Hidden Markov Model Applications in Change-Point Analysis

The detection of change-points in heterogeneous sequences is a statistical challenge with many applications in fields such as finance, signal analysis and biology. A wide variety of literature exists for finding an ideal set of change-points for characterizing the data. In this tutorial we elaborate on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and present two different frameworks for applying HMM to change-point models. Then we provide a summary of two procedures for inference in change-point analysis, which are particular cases of the forward-backward algorithm for HMMs, and discuss common implementation problems. Lastly, we provide two examples of the HMM methods on available data sets and we shortly discuss about the applications to current genomics studies. The R code used in the examples is provided in the appendix.