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Monitoring for Distribution Changes

Nina Zumel explains how we can track if something has changed by monitoring its distribution:

A client recently came to us with a question: what’s a good way to monitor data or model output for changes? That is, how can you tell if new data is distributed differently from previous data, or if the distribution of scores returned by a model have changed? This client, like many others who have faced the same problem, simply checked whether the mean and standard deviation of the data had changed more than some amount, where the threshold value they checked against was selected in a more or less ad-hoc manner. But they were curious whether there was some other, perhaps more principled way, to check for a change in distribution.

The answer is, of course, that there is. Click through to see a few of the techniques.