Automatic offset detection using R open source libraries

Long GNSS position time series contain offsets typically at rates between 1 and 3 offsets per decade. We may classify the offsets whether their epoch is precisely known, from GNSS station log files or Earthquake databases, or unknown. Very often, GNSS position time series contain offsets for which the epoch is not known a priori and, therefore, an offset detection/removal operation needs to be done in order to produce continuous position time series needed for many applications in geodesy and geophysics. A further classification of the offsets corresponds to those having a physical origin related to the instantaneous displacement of the GNSS antenna phase center (from Earthquakes, antenna changes or even changes of the environment of the antenna) and those spurious originated from the offset detection method being used (manual/supervised or automatic/unsupervised). Offsets due to changes of the antenna and its environment must be avoided by the station operators as much as possible. Spurious offsets due to the detection method must be avoided by the time series analyst and are the focus of this work.

Even if manual offset detection by expert analysis is likely to perform better, automatic offset detection algorithms are extremely useful when using massive (thousands) GNSS time series sets. Change point detection and cluster analysis algorithms can be used for detecting offsets in a GNSS time series data and R offers a number of libraries related to performing these two. For example, the “Bayesian Analysis of Change Point Problems” or the “bcp” helps to detect change points in a time series data. Similarly, the “dtwclust” (Dynamic Time Warping algorithm) is used for the time series cluster analysis. Our objective is to assess various open-source R libraries for the automatic offset detection.