Detecting relevant changes in the spatiotemporal mean function

Abstract: For a spatiotemporal process ${X_j(s,t) | ~s \in S~,~t \in T }_{j =1, \ldots , n} $, where $S$ denotes the set of spatial locations and $T$ the time domain, we consider the problem of testing for a change in the sequence of mean functions. In contrast to most of the literature we are not interested in arbitrarily small changes, but only in changes with a norm exceeding a given threshold. Asymptotically distribution free tests are proposed, which do not require the estimation of the long-run spatiotemporal covariance structure. In particular we consider a fully functional approach and a test based on the cumulative sum paradigm, investigate the large sample properties of the corresponding test statistics and study their finite sample properties by means of simulation study.