Detection and Estimation of Structural Breaks in High-Dimensional Functional Time Series

Modelling functional time series, time series of random functions defined within a finite interval, has became one of the main frontiers of developments in time series models. Various functional linear and nonlinear time series models have been proposed and extensively studied in the past two decades (e.g., Bosq, 2000; Hörmann and Kokoszka, 2010; Horváth and Kokoszka, 2012; Hörmann, Horváth and Reeder, 2013; Li, Robinson and Shang, 2020). These models together with relevant methodologies have been applied to various fields such as biology, demography, economics, environmental science and finance. However, the model frameworks and methodologies developed in the aforementioned literature heavily rely on the stationarity assumption, which is often rejected when testing the functional time series data in practice. For example, Horváth, Kokoszka and Rice (2014) find evidence of nonstationarity for intraday price curves of some stocks collected in the US market; Aue, Rice and Sönmez (2018) reject the null hypothesis of stationarity for the temperature curves collected in Australia; and Li, Robinson and Shang (2023) reveal evidence of nonstationary feature for the functional time series constructed from the age-and sex-specific life-table death counts. It thus becomes imperative to test whether the collected functional time series are stationary. The primary interest of this paper is to test whether there exist structural breaks in the mean function over time and subsequently estimate locations of breaks if they do exist. There have been increasing interests on detecting and estimating structural breaks in functional time series. Broadly speaking, there are two types of detection techniques.