Climate change is the result of complex interactions between a wide array of climatic variables. Over a long period of time, climatic patterns can shift, possibly multiple times. Abrupt shifts that occur over a relatively short period of time are known as change points. During these intervals, different climatic variables may undergo dramatic shifts posing serious consequences for many biological and physical systems. In this...

Given distinct climatic periods in the various facets of the Earth's climate system, many attempts have been made to determine the exact timing of ‘change points’ or regime boundaries. However, identification of change points is not always a simple task. A time series containing N data points has approximately N k distinct placements of k change points, rendering brute force enumeration futile as the length of the time series...