Sequential change-point detection seeks to rapidly identify distributional changes in streaming data while controlling false alarms. Existing multi-stream detection methods typically rely on non-private access to raw observations or intermediate statistics, limiting their usage in privacy-sensitive settings. We study sequential change-point detection for multiple data streams under differential privacy constraints. We consider multiple independent streams undergoing a synchronized change at an unknown time and in an unknown subset of streams, and propose DP-SUM-CUSUM, a differentially private detection procedure based on the summation of per-stream CUSUM statistics with calibrated Laplace noise injection. We show that DP-SUM-CUSUM satisfies sequential $\varepsilon$-differential privacy and derive bounds on the average run length to false alarm and the worst-case average detection delay, explicitly characterizing the privacy--efficiency tradeoff. A truncation-based extension is also presented to handle distributional shifts with unbounded log-likelihood ratios. Simulations and experiments on an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet dataset validate the proposed approach.

Sequential change detection is a fundamental problem in statistics and signal processing, with the CUSUM procedure widely used to achieve minimax detection delay under a prescribed false-alarm rate when pre- and post-change distributions are fully known. However, releasing CUSUM statistics and the corresponding stopping time directly can compromise individual data privacy. We therefore introduce a differentially private (DP) variant, called DP-CUSUM, that injects calibrated Laplace noise into both the vanilla CUSUM statistics and the detection threshold, preserving the recursive simplicity of the classical CUSUM statistics while ensuring per-sample differential privacy. We derive closed-form bounds on the average run length to false alarm and on the worst-case average detection delay, explicitly characterizing the trade-off among privacy level, false-alarm rate, and detection efficiency. Our theoretical results imply that under a weak privacy constraint, our proposed DP-CUSUM procedure achieves the same first-order asymptotic optimality as the classical, non-private CUSUM procedure. Numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the detection efficiency of our proposed DP-CUSUM under different privacy constraints, and the results are consistent with our theoretical findings.

Time series data are crucial across diverse domains such as finance and healthcare, where accurate forecasting and decision-making rely on advanced modeling techniques. While generative models have shown great promise in capturing the intricate dynamics inherent in time series, evaluating their performance remains a major challenge. Traditional evaluation metrics fall short due to the temporal dependencies and potential high dimensionality of the features. In this paper, we propose the REcurrent NeurAL (RENAL) Goodness-of-Fit test, a novel and statistically rigorous framework for evaluating generative time series models. By leveraging recurrent neural networks, we transform the time series into conditionally independent data pairs, enabling the application of a chi-square-based goodness-of-fit test to the temporal dependencies within the data. This approach offers a robust, theoretically grounded solution for assessing the quality of generative models, particularly in settings with limited time sequences. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method across both synthetic and real-world datasets, outperforming existing methods in terms of reliability and accuracy. Our method fills a critical gap in the evaluation of time series generative models, offering a tool that is both practical and adaptable to high-stakes applications.

We study the private online change detection problem for dynamic communities, using a censored block model (CBM). We consider edge differential privacy (DP) in both local and central settings, and propose joint change detection and community estimation procedures for both scenarios. We seek to understand the fundamental tradeoffs between the privacy budget, detection delay, and exact community recovery of community labels. Further, we provide theoretical guarantees for the effectiveness of our proposed method by showing necessary and sufficient conditions for change detection and exact recovery under edge DP. Simulation and real data examples are provided to validate the proposed methods.

The problem of quickest detection of a change in the distribution of streaming data is considered. It is assumed that the pre-change distribution is known, while the only information about the post-change is through a (small) set of labeled data. This post-change data is used in a data-driven minimax robust framework, where an uncertainty set for the post-change distribution is constructed. The robust change detection problem is studied in an asymptotic setting where the mean time to false alarm goes to infinity. It is shown that the least favorable distribution (LFD) is an exponentially tilted version of the pre-change density and can be obtained efficiently. A Cumulative Sum (CuSum) test based on the LFD, which is referred to as the distributionally robust (DR) CuSum test, is then shown to be asymptotically robust. The results are extended to the case with multiple post-change uncertainty sets and validated using synthetic and real data examples.

We consider the robust online change-point detection problem with unknown post-change distributions. An online sequence of non-parametric uncertainty sets are constructed for the underlying data distribution. We sequentially determine the least favorable distribution at every instance by framing the issue as an online convex optimization task. This least favorable distribution is then leveraged to calculate the log-likelihood ratio within our proposed online robust CUSUM (OR-CUSUM) detection statistic. We also present numerical findings to corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed OR-CUSUM test.

Diffusion models, a specific type of generative model, have achieved unprecedented performance in recent years and consistently produce high-quality synthetic samples. A critical prerequisite for their notable success lies in the presence of a substantial number of training samples, which can be impractical in real-world applications due to high collection costs or associated risks. Consequently, various finetuning and regularization approaches have been proposed to transfer knowledge from existing pre-trained models to specific target domains with limited data. This paper introduces the Transfer Guided Diffusion Process (TGDP), a novel approach distinct from conventional finetuning and regularization methods. We prove that the optimal diffusion model for the target domain integrates pre-trained diffusion models on the source domain with additional guidance from a domain classifier. We further extend TGDP to a conditional version for modeling the joint distribution of data and its corresponding labels, together with two additional regularization terms to enhance the model performance. We validate the effectiveness of TGDP on both simulated and real-world datasets.

Synthetic data generation has become an emerging tool to help improve the adversarial robustness in classification tasks, since robust learning requires a significantly larger amount of training samples compared with standard classification. Among various deep generative models, the diffusion model has been shown to produce high-quality synthetic images and has achieved good performance in improving the adversarial robustness. However, diffusion-type methods are generally slower in data generation as compared with other generative models. Although different acceleration techniques have been proposed recently, it is also of great importance to study how to improve the sample efficiency of synthetic data for the downstream task. In this paper, we first analyze the optimality condition of synthetic distribution for achieving improved robust accuracy. We show that enhancing the distinguishability among the generated data is critical for improving adversarial robustness. Thus, we propose the Contrastive-Guided Diffusion Process (Contrastive-DP), which incorporates the contrastive loss to guide the diffusion model in data generation. We validate our theoretical results using simulations and demonstrate the good performance of Contrastive-DP on image datasets.

We study the parametric online changepoint detection problem, where the underlying distribution of the streaming data changes from a known distribution to an alternative that is of a known parametric form but with unknown parameters. We propose a joint detection/estimation scheme, which we call Window-Limited CUSUM, that combines the cumulative sum (CUSUM) test with a sliding window-based consistent estimate of the post-change parameters. We characterize the optimal choice of the window size and show that the Window-Limited CUSUM enjoys first-order asymptotic optimality as average run length approaches infinity under the optimal choice of window length. Compared to existing schemes with similar asymptotic optimality properties, our test can be much faster computed because it can recursively update the CUSUM statistic by employing the estimate of the post-change parameters. A parallel variant is also proposed that facilitates the practical implementation of the test. Numerical simulations corroborate our theoretical findings.

Detecting abrupt changes in the community structure of a network from noisy observations is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. This paper presents an online change detection algorithm called Spectral-CUSUM to detect unknown network structure changes through a generalized likelihood ratio statistic. We characterize the average run length (ARL) and the expected detection delay (EDD) of the Spectral-CUSUM procedure and prove its asymptotic optimality. Finally, we demonstrate the good performance of the Spectral-CUSUM procedure and compare it with several baseline methods using simulations and real data examples on seismic event detection using sensor network data.

We study the robust quickest change detection under unknown pre- and post-change distributions. To deal with uncertainties in the data-generating distributions, we formulate two data-driven ambiguity sets based on the Wasserstein distance, without any parametric assumptions. The minimax robust test is constructed as the CUSUM test under least favorable distributions, a representative pair of distributions in the ambiguity sets. We show that the minimax robust test can be obtained in a tractable way and is asymptotically optimal. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed robust test over existing methods, including the generalized likelihood ratio test and the robust test under KL divergence based ambiguity sets.

Learning a robust classifier from a few samples remains a key challenge in machine learning. A major thrust of research has been focused on developing k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) based algorithms combined with metric learning that captures similarities between samples. When the samples are limited, robustness is especially crucial to ensure the generalization capability of the classifier. In this paper, we study a minimax distributionally robust formulation of weighted k-nearest neighbors, which aims to find the optimal weighted k-NN classifiers that hedge against feature uncertainties. We develop an algorithm, Dr.k-NN, that efficiently solves this functional optimization problem and features in assigning minimax optimal weights to training samples when performing classification. These weights are class-dependent, and are determined by the similarities of sample features under the least favorable scenarios. When the size of the uncertainty set is properly tuned, the robust classifier has a smaller Lipschitz norm than the vanilla k-NN, and thus improves the generalization capability. We also couple our framework with neural-network-based feature embedding. We demonstrate the competitive performance of our algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art in the few-training-sample setting with various real-data experiments.

Sequential change detection for graphs is a fundamental problem for streaming network data and has wide applications in social networks and power systems. Given fixed vertices and a sequence of random graphs, the objective is to detect the change-point where the underlying distribution of the random graph changes. In particular, we focus on the local change that only affects a small subgraph. We adopt the classical Erdős-Rényi model and revisit the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) procedure. The scan statistic is computed by sequentially estimating the most-likely subgraph where the change happens. We provide theoretical analysis for the asymptotic optimality of the proposed procedure and we comment on generalizations to other random graph models. We demonstrate the efficiency of our detection algorithm using simulations.

We present an online community change detection algorithm called spectral CUSUM to detect the emergence of a community using a subspace projection procedure based on a Gaussian model setting. Theoretical analysis is provided to characterize the average run length (ARL) and expected detection delay (EDD), as well as the asymptotic optimality. Simulation and real data examples demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method.

Multivariate Hawkes processes are commonly used to model streaming networked event data in a wide variety of applications. However, it remains a challenge to extract reliable inference from complex datasets with uncertainty quantification. Aiming towards this, we develop a statistical inference framework to learn causal relationships between nodes from networked data, where the underlying directed graph implies Granger causality. We provide uncertainty quantification for the maximum likelihood estimate of the network multivariate Hawkes process by providing a non-asymptotic confidence set. The main technique is based on the concentration inequalities of continuous-time martingales. We compare our method to the previously-derived asymptotic Hawkes process confidence interval, and demonstrate the strengths of our method in an application to neuronal connectivity reconstruction.

We consider the sequential change-point detection for asynchronous multi-sensors, where each sensor observe a signal (due to change-point) at different times. We propose an asynchronous Subspace-CUSUM procedure based on jointly estimating the unknown signal waveform and the unknown relative delays between sensors. Using the estimated delays, we can align signals and use the subspace to combine multiple sensor observations. We derive the optimal drift parameter for the proposed procedure, and characterize the relationship between the expected detection delay, average run length (of false alarms), and the energy of the time-varying signal. We demonstrate the good performance of the proposed procedure using simulation and real data. We also demonstrate that the proposed procedure outperforms the well-known "one-shot procedure" in detecting weak and asynchronous signals.

Sequential hypothesis test and change-point detection when the distribution parameters are unknown is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. We show that for such problems, detection procedures based on sequential likelihood ratios with simple one-sample update estimates such as online mirror descent are nearly second-order optimal. This means that the upper bound for the algorithm performance meets the lower bound asymptotically up to a log-log factor in the false-alarm rate when it tends to zero. This is a blessing, since although the generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) statistics are optimal theoretically, but they cannot be computed recursively, and their exact computation usually requires infinite memory of historical data. We prove the nearly second-order optimality by making a connection between sequential change-point detection and online convex optimization and leveraging the logarithmic regret bound property of online mirror descent algorithm. Numerical examples validate our theory.

We develop a novel computationally efficient and general framework for robust hypothesis testing. The new framework features a new way to construct uncertainty sets under the null and the alternative distributions, which are sets centered around the empirical distribution defined via Wasserstein metric, thus our approach is data-driven and free of distributional assumptions. We develop a convex safe approximation of the minimax formulation and show that such approximation renders a nearly-optimal detector among the family of all possible tests. By exploiting the structure of the least favorable distribution, we also develop a tractable reformulation of such approximation, with complexity independent of the dimension of observation space and can be nearly sample-size-independent in general. Real-data example using human activity data demonstrated the excellent performance of the new robust detector.