This paper describes opportunities and challenges of using functional data analysis (FDA) for the exploration and analysis of data originating from electronic commerce (eCommerce). We discuss the special data structure that arise in the online environment and why FDA is a natural approach for representing and analyzing such data. The paper reviews several FDA methods and motivates their usefuln...

The study proposes a framework based on functional analysis of transaction data to predict customer spending during promotional events. Retailers face the challenge of considering an extant number of variables and of accounting for methodological constraints while modeling customer response to promotions. Noise and uneven distribution of spending further introduces error into traditional models...

This research uses functional data modeling to study the price formation process in online auctions. It conceptualizes the price evolution and its first and second derivatives (velocity and acceleration respectively) as the primary objects of interest. Together these three functional objects permit us to talk about the dynamics of an auction, and how the influence of different factors vary thro...

We thank the editor Professor David Steinberg for organizing this stimulating discussion. We are also grateful to all the discussants for their constructive comments about the method proposed in our paper (denoted as QZW hereafter). Profile monitoring is a relatively new research area; but, it has a profound application background (cf., Wang and Tsung 2005, Woodall et al. 2004). Due to the fact...

Current fixed and mobile networks’ behavior is rapidly changing, which calls for flexible monitoring approaches to avoid loosing track with such a fast evolutionary pace. Due to the many challenges that this scenario is posing to network managers, we propose the exploration of Functional Data Analysis (FDA) techniques as a mean to easily deal with network management and analysis issues. Specifi...

Functional Data Analysis is a relatively new branch in Statistics. Experiments where a complete function is observed for each individual give rise to functional data. In this work we focus on the case of functional data presenting spatial dependence. The three classic types of spatial data structures (geostatistical data, point patterns and areal data) can be combined with functional data as it...

As in the multivariate setting, the class of elliptical distributions on separable Hilbert spaces serves as an important vehicle and reference point for the development and evaluation of robust methods in functional data analysis. In this paper, we present a simple characterization of elliptical distributions on separable Hilbert spaces, namely we show that the class of elliptical distributions...