Empirical Transfer Operators and Finite-Sample Change Detection for Noisy Expanding Interval Maps

We study a finite-sample change-detection problem for one-dimensional noisy dynamical systems using partition-based empirical approximations of stationary behaviour. Given observations from an interval-valued process, we partition the state space into finitely many intervals and estimate a transition matrix from observed transitions between partition elements. After a small Doeblin-type regularisation, the resulting matrix has a unique stationary distribution. This stationary distribution is used as a finite-dimensional approximation of the invariant density, or stationary law, of the observed regime. Using an initial reference segment, we compute a baseline empirical stationary distribution bπ0,ρ. For each subsequent sliding window, we compute a window-based empirical stationary distribution bπt,ρ and define the score St = bπt,ρ bπ0,ρ 1. Large values of St indicate that the stationary behaviour of the observed regime has changed relative to the baseline. The statistic is therefore a detector of changes in stationary behaviour. It is not, by itself, a detector of all possible changes in transition dynamics that preserve the invariant density.