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

Feature Selection for Functional Data

In this paper we address the problem of feature selection when the data is functional, we study several statistical procedures including classification, regression and principal components. One advantage of the blinding procedure is that it is very flexible since the features are defined by a set of functions, relevant to the problem being studied, proposed by the user. Our method is consistent under a set of quite general assumptions, and produces good results with the real data examples that we analyze.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Statistical inferences for functional data

With modern technology development, functional data are being observed frequently in many scientific fields. A popular method for analyzing such functional data is ``smoothing first, then estimation.'' That is, statistical inference such as estimation and hypothesis testing about functional data is conducted based on the substitution of the underlying individual functions by their reconstructions obtained by one smoothing technique or another. However, little is known about this substitution effect on functional data analysis. In this paper this problem is investigated when the local polynomial kernel (LPK) smoothing technique is used for individual function reconstructions. We find that under some mild conditions, the substitution effect can be ignored asymptotically. Based on this, we construct LPK reconstruction-based estimators for the mean, covariance and noise variance functions of a functional data set and derive their asymptotics. We also propose a GCV rule for selecting good bandwidths for the LPK reconstructions. When the mean function also depends on some time-independent covariates, we consider a functional linear model where the mean function is linearly related to the covariates but the covariate effects are functions of time. The LPK reconstruction-based estimators for the covariate effects and the covariance function are also constructed and their asymptotics are derived. Moreover, we propose a $L^2$-norm-based global test statistic for a general hypothesis testing problem about the covariate effects and derive its asymptotic random expression. The effect of the bandwidths selected by the proposed GCV rule on the accuracy of the LPK reconstructions and the mean function estimator is investigated via a simulation study. The proposed methodologies are illustrated via an application to a real functional data set collected in climatology.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000001505 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org