B0941
Title: Simultaneous estimation and registration of sparse, fragmented and noisy functional data
Authors: Sebastian Kurtek - The Ohio State University (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: In many applications, smooth processes generate data that is recorded under a variety of observational regimes, including dense sampling and sparse or fragmented observations that are often contaminated with an error. The statistical goal of registering and estimating the underlying functions from discrete observations has thus far been mainly approached sequentially without formal uncertainty propagation, or in an application-specific manner by pooling information across subjects. We propose a Bayesian framework for simultaneous registration and estimation, which is flexible enough to accommodate inference on individual functions under general observational regimes. We rely on the specification of strongly informative prior models over the amplitude component of function variability using two strategies: a data-driven approach that defines an empirical basis for the amplitude subspace based on training data, and a shape-restricted approach when the relative location and number of extrema is well-understood. The proposed methods build on the elastic functional data analysis framework to separately model amplitude and phase variability. We emphasize the importance of uncertainty quantification and visualization of these two components as they provide complementary information about the estimated functions. We validate the proposed framework using simulation studies and real applications.
