Offline changepoint localization using a matrix of conformal p-values
Abstract
Changepoint localization is the problem of estimating the index at which a change occurred in the data generating distribution of an ordered list of data, or declaring that no change occurred. We present the broadly applicable MCP algorithm, which uses a matrix of conformal p-values to produce a confidence interval for a (single) changepoint under the mild assumption that the pre-change and post-change distributions are each exchangeable. We prove a novel conformal Neyman-Pearson lemma, motivating practical classifier-based choices for our conformal score function. Finally, we exemplify the MCP algorithm on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets, including using black-box pre-trained classifiers to detect changes in sequences of images, text, and accelerometer data.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.00292,
title = {Offline changepoint localization using a matrix of conformal p-values},
author = {Sanjit Dandapanthula and Aaditya Ramdas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.00292},
year = {2026}
}