There has been much attention in recent years to the problem of detecting mean changes in a piecewise constant time series. Often, methods assume that the noise can be taken to be independent, identically distributed (IID), which in practice may not be a reasonable assumption. There is comparatively little work studying the problem of mean changepoint detection in time series with nontrivial autocovariance structure. In this article, we propose a likelihood‐based method using wavelets to detect changes in mean in time series that exhibit time‐varying autocovariance. Our proposed technique is shown to work well for time series with a variety of error structures via a simulation study, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on two data examples arising in economics.

Most time series observed in practice exhibit first-as well as second-order non-stationarity. In this article we propose a novel framework for modelling series with simultaneous time-varying first-and second-order structure, removing the restrictive zero-mean assumption of locally stationary wavelet processes and extending the applicability of the locally stationary wavelet model to include trend components. We develop an associated estimation theory for both first-and second-order time series quantities and show that our estimators achieve good properties in isolation of each other by making appropriate assumptions on the series trend. We demonstrate the utility of the method by analysing the global mean sea temperature time series, highlighting the impact of the changing climate.

Most time series observed in practice exhibit time-varying trend (first-order) and autocovariance (second-order) behaviour. Differencing is a commonly-used technique to remove the trend in such series, in order to estimate the time-varying second-order structure (of the differenced series). However, often we require inference on the second-order behaviour of the original series, for example, when performing trend estimation. In this article, we propose a method, using differencing, to jointly estimate the time-varying trend and second-order structure of a nonstationary time series, within the locally stationary wavelet modelling framework. We develop a wavelet-based estimator of the second-order structure of the original time series based on the differenced estimate, and show how this can be incorporated into the estimation of the trend of the time series. We perform a simulation study to investigate the performance of the methodology, and demonstrate the utility of the method by analysing data examples from environmental and biomedical science.