Overlapping window tests for correlation and trend

We develop a general framework for constructing and analyzing overlapping sliding-window statistics for dependence and trend detection. For a fixed window size, the overlapping blocks form a Markov chain, and the asymptotic variance of any centered window statistic is determined by the covariance operator of this chain. Using its spectral structure, we obtain an orthogonal decomposition of the space of window functions into components associated with different overlap levels. This leads to a natural notion of incremental dependence information: the part of a statistic that captures exactly the new information introduced by enlarging the window.
We give an explicit procedure for extracting these components and apply the method to two classes of examples. For correlation detection, we study symmetric polynomial window functions and identify their informative projected part. For trend detection, we analyze localized rank-based statistics and isolate the contribution of the largest newly introduced lag. The examples also show that different statistics may exhibit different local detection scales, including nonclassical ones. The same viewpoint leads to a natural quantitative measure of incremental information, which can be used to assess how much new dependence structure is captured as the window size increases, and to guide scale selection. Overall, the paper provides a systematic method for designing overlapping-window tests and deriving their asymptotic normalization and local behavior.