Weakly dependent functional data

Functional data often arise from measurements on fine time grids and are obtained by separating an almost continuous time record into natural consecutive intervals, for example, days. The functions thus obtained form a functional time series, and the central issue in the analysis of such data consists in taking into account the temporal dependence of these functional observations. Examples include daily curves of financial transaction data and daily patterns of geophysical and environmental data. For scalar and vector valued stochastic processes, a large number of dependence notions have been proposed, mostly involving mixing type distances between $\sigma$-algebras. In time series analysis, measures of dependence based on moments have proven most useful (autocovariances and cumulants). We introduce a moment-based notion of dependence for functional time series which involves $m$-dependence. We show that it is applicable to linear as well as nonlinear functional time series. Then we investigate the impact of dependence thus quantified on several important statistical procedures for functional data. We study the estimation of the functional principal components, the long-run covariance matrix, change point detection and the functional linear model. We explain when temporal dependence affects the results obtained for i.i.d. functional observations and when these results are robust to weak dependence.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS768 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Fourier analysis of stationary time series in function space

We develop the basic building blocks of a frequency domain framework for drawing statistical inferences on the second-order structure of a stationary sequence of functional data. The key element in such a context is the spectral density operator, which generalises the notion of a spectral density matrix to the functional setting, and characterises the second-order dynamics of the process. Our main tool is the functional Discrete Fourier Transform (fDFT). We derive an asymptotic Gaussian representation of the fDFT, thus allowing the transformation of the original collection of dependent random functions into a collection of approximately independent complex-valued Gaussian random functions. Our results are then employed in order to construct estimators of the spectral density operator based on smoothed versions of the periodogram kernel, the functional generalisation of the periodogram matrix. The consistency and asymptotic law of these estimators are studied in detail. As immediate consequences, we obtain central limit theorems for the mean and the long-run covariance operator of a stationary functional time series. Our results do not depend on structural modelling assumptions, but only functional versions of classical cumulant mixing conditions, and are shown to be stable under discrete observation of the individual curves.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1086 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

On the prediction of stationary functional time series

This paper addresses the prediction of stationary functional time series. Existing contributions to this problem have largely focused on the special case of first-order functional autoregressive processes because of their technical tractability and the current lack of advanced functional time series methodology. It is shown here how standard multivariate prediction techniques can be utilized in this context. The connection between functional and multivariate predictions is made precise for the important case of vector and functional autoregressions. The proposed method is easy to implement, making use of existing statistical software packages, and may therefore be attractive to a broader, possibly non-academic, audience. Its practical applicability is enhanced through the introduction of a novel functional final prediction error model selection criterion that allows for an automatic determination of the lag structure and the dimensionality of the model. The usefulness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated in a simulation study and an application to environmental data, namely the prediction of daily pollution curves describing the concentration of particulate matter in ambient air. It is found that the proposed prediction method often significantly outperforms existing methods