Title:
Statistical computation and inference for functional data analysis
Statistical computation and inference for functional data analysis
Author(s)
Jiang, Huijing
Advisor(s)
Serban, Nicoleta
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Abstract
My doctoral research dissertation focuses on two aspects of functional data analysis (FDA): FDA under spatial interdependence and FDA for multi-level data.
The first part of my thesis focuses on developing modeling and inference procedure for functional data under spatial dependence. The methodology introduced in this part is motivated by a research study on inequities in accessibility to financial services.
The first research problem in this part is concerned with a novel model-based method for clustering random time functions which are spatially interdependent. A cluster consists of time functions which are similar in shape. The time functions are decomposed into spatial global and time-dependent cluster effects using a semi-parametric model. We also assume that
the clustering membership is a realization from a Markov random field. Under these model assumptions, we borrow information across curves from nearby locations resulting in enhanced estimation accuracy of the cluster effects and of the cluster membership. In a simulation study, we assess the estimation accuracy of our clustering algorithm under a series of settings: small number of time points, high noise level and varying dependence structures. Over all simulation settings, the spatial-functional clustering method outperforms existing model-based clustering methods. In the case study presented in this project, we focus on estimates and classifies service accessibility patterns varying over a large geographic area (California and Georgia) and over a period of 15 years. The focus of this study is on financial services but it generally applies to any other service operation.
The second research project of this part studies an association analysis of space-time varying processes, which is rigorous, computational feasible and implementable with standard software. We introduce general measures to model different aspects of the temporal and spatial association between processes varying in space and time. Using a nonparametric spatiotemporal model, we show that the proposed association estimators are asymptotically unbiased and consistent. We complement the point association estimates with simultaneous confidence bands to assess the uncertainty in the point estimates. In a simulation study, we evaluate the accuracy of the association estimates with respect to the sample size as well as the coverage of the confidence bands. In the case study in this project, we investigate the association between service accessibility and income level. The primary objective of this association analysis is to assess whether there are significant changes in the income-driven equity of financial service accessibility over time and to identify potential under-served markets.
The second part of the thesis discusses novel statistical methodology for analyzing multilevel functional data including a clustering method based on a functional ANOVA model and a spatio-temporal model for functional data with a nested hierarchical structure. In this part, I introduce and compare a series of clustering approaches for multilevel functional data. For brevity, I present the clustering methods for two-level data: multiple samples of random functions, each sample corresponding to a case and each random function within a sample/case corresponding to a measurement type. A cluster consists of cases which have similar within-case means (level-1 clustering) or similar between-case means (level-2 clustering). Our primary focus is to evaluate a model-based clustering to more straightforward hard clustering methods. The clustering model is based on a multilevel functional principal component analysis. In a simulation study, we assess the estimation accuracy of our clustering algorithm under a series of settings: small vs. moderate number of time points, high noise level and small number of measurement types. We demonstrate the applicability of the clustering analysis to a real data set consisting of time-varying sales for multiple products sold by a large retailer in the U.S.
My ongoing research work in multilevel functional data analysis is developing a statistical model for estimating temporal and spatial associations of a series of time-varying variables with an intrinsic nested hierarchical structure. This work has a great potential in many real applications where the data are areal data collected from different data sources and over geographic regions of different spatial resolution.
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Date Issued
2010-11-09
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Dissertation