Functional Data Analysis is a relatively new branch of Statistics devoted to describing and modelling data that are complete functions. Many relevant aspects of musical performance and perception can be understood and quantified as dynamic processes evolving as functions of time. In this paper, we show that Functional Data Analysis is a statistical methodology well-suited for research into the ...

Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a powerful tool for the study of oxygenation and hemodynamics of living tissues. Despite the continuous nature of the processes generating the data, analysis of fNIRS data has been limited to discrete-time methods. We propose a technique, namely functional data analysis (fDA), that converts discrete samples to continuous curves. We used fNIRS dat...

Bid arrivals of eBay auctions often exhibit “bid sniping”, a phenomenon where “snipers” place their bids at the last moments of an auction. This is one reason why bid histories for eBay auctions tend to have sparse data in the middle and denser data both in the beginning and at the end of the auction. Time spacing of the bids is thus irregular and sparse. For nearly identical products that are ...

Data analysis on non-Euclidean spaces, such as tree spaces, can be challenging. The main contribution of this paper is establishment of a connection between tree data spaces and the well developed area of Functional Data Analysis (FDA), where the data objects are curves. This connection comes through two tree representation approaches, the Dyck path representation and the branch length represen...

We propose a nonparametric method to perform functional principal components analysis for the case of sparse longitudinal data. The method aims at irregularly spaced longitudinal data, where the number of repeated measurements available per subject is small. In contrast, classical functional data analysis requires a large number of regularly spaced measurements per subject. We assume that the r...