Dispersion operators and resistant second-order functional data analysis

Inferences related to the second-order properties of functional data, as expressed by covariance structure, can become unreliable when the data are non-Gaussian or contain unusual observations. In the functional setting, it is often difficult to identify atypical observations, as their distinguishing characteristics can be manifold but subtle. In this paper, we introduce the notion of a dispersion operator, investigate its use in probing the second-order structure of functional data, and develop a test for comparing the second-order characteristics of two functional samples that is resistant to atypical observations and departures from normality. The proposed test is a regularized M-test based on a spectrally truncated version of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of a score operator defined via the dispersion operator. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic, investigate the behaviour of the test in a simulation study and illustrate the method on a structural biology dataset.

Functional data analysis by matrix completion

Marie-Hélène Descary

Traditional approaches to analysing functional data typically follow a two-step procedure, consisting in first smoothing and then carrying out a functional principal component analysis. The idea underlying this procedure is that functional data are well approximated by smooth functions, and that rough variations are due to noise. However, it may very well happen that localised features are rough at a global scale but still smooth at some finer scale. In this thesis we put forward a new statistical approach for functional data arising as the sum of two uncorrelated components: one smooth plus one rough. We give non-parametric conditions under which the covariance operators of the smooth and of the rough components are jointly identifiable on the basis of discretely observed data: the covariance operator corresponding to the smooth component must be of finite rank and have real analytic eigenfunctions, while the one corresponding to the rough component must have a banded covariance function. We construct consistent estimators of both covariance operators without assuming knowledge of the true rank or bandwidth. We then use them to estimate the best linear predictors of the the smooth and the rough components of each functional datum. In both the identifiability and the inference part, we do not follow the usual strategy used in functional data analysis which is to first employ smoothing and work with continuous estimate of the covariance operator. Instead, we work directly with the covariance matrix of the discretely observed data, which allows us to use results and tools from linear algebra. In fact, we show that the whole problem of uniquely recovering the covariance operator of the smooth component given the one of the raw data can be seen as a low-rank matrix completion problem, and we make great use of a classical relation between the rank and the minors of a matrix to solve this matrix completion problem. The finite-sample performance of our approach is studied by means of simulation study.

EPFL2017

Recovering covariance from functional fragments

Marie-Hélène Descary, Victor Panaretos

We consider nonparametric estimation of a covariance function on the unit square, given a sample of discretely observed fragments of functional data. When each sample path is observed only on a subinterval of length , one has no statistical information on the unknown covariance outside a -band around the diagonal. The problem seems unidentifiable without parametric assumptions, but we show that nonparametric estimation is feasible under suitable smoothness and rank conditions on the unknown covariance. This remains true even when the observations are discrete, and we give precise deterministic conditions on how fine the observation grid needs to be relative to the rank and fragment length for identifiability to hold true. We show that our conditions translate the estimation problem to a low-rank matrix completion problem, construct a nonparametric estimator in this vein, and study its asymptotic properties. We illustrate the numerical performance of our method on real and simulated data.

2019

Sparsely Observed Functional Time Series: Theory and Applications

Tomas Rubin

Functional time series is a temporally ordered sequence of not necessarily independent random curves. While the statistical analysis of such data has been traditionally carried out under the assumption of completely observed functional data, it may well happen that the statistician only has access to a relatively low number of sparse measurements for each random curve. These discrete measurements may be moreover irregularly scattered in each curve's domain, missing altogether for some curves, and be contaminated by measurement noise. This sparse sampling protocol escapes from the reach of established estimators in functional time series analysis and therefore requires development of a novel methodology. The core objective of this thesis is development of a non-parametric statistical toolbox for analysis of sparsely observed functional time series data. Assuming smoothness of the latent curves, we construct a local-polynomial-smoother based estimator of the spectral density operator producing a consistent estimator of the complete second order structure of the data. Moreover, the spectral domain recovery approach allows for prediction of latent curve data at a given time by borrowing strength from the estimated dynamic correlations in the entire time series across time. Further to predicting the latent curves from their noisy point samples, the method fills in gaps in the sequence (curves nowhere sampled), denoises the data, and serves as a basis for forecasting. A classical non-parametric apparatus for encoding the dependence between a pair of or among a multiple functional time series, whether sparsely or fully observed, is the functional lagged regression model. This consists of a linear filter between the regressors time series and the response. We show how to tailor the smoother based estimators for the estimation of the cross-spectral density operators and the cross-covariance operators and, by means of spectral truncation and Tikhonov regularisation techniques, how to estimate the lagged regression filter and predict the response process. The simulation studies revealed the following findings: (i) if one has freedom to design a sampling scheme with a fixed number of measurements, it is advantageous to sparsely distribute these measurements in a longer time horizon rather than concentrating over a shorter time horizon to achieve dense measurements in order to diminish the spectral density estimation error, (ii) the developed functional recovery predictor surpasses the static predictor not exploiting the temporal dependence, (iii) neither of the two considered regularisation techniques can, in general, dominate the other for the estimation in functional lagged regression models. The new methodologies are illustrated by applications to real data: the meteorological data revolving around the fair-weather atmospheric electricity measured in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and at Wank mountain, Germany; and a case study analysing the dependence of the US Treasury yield curve on macroeconomic variables. As a secondary contribution, we present a novel simulation method for general stationary functional time series defined through their spectral properties. A simulation study shows universality of such approach and superiority of the spectral domain simulation over the temporal domain in some situations.