An objective change-point analysis of historical Atlantic hurricane numbers

Abstract

We perform an objective change-point analysis on 106 years of historical hurricane number data. The algorithm we use looks at all possible combinations of change-points and compares them in terms of the variances of the differences between real and modelled numbers. Overfitting is avoided by using cross-validation. We identify four change-points, and show that the presence of temporal structure in the hurricane number time series is highly statistically significant.