A2010
Title: Inference for dispersion and curvature of random objects
Authors: Wookyeong Song - University of California, Davis (United States) [presenting]
Hans-Georg Mueller - University of California Davis (United States)
Abstract: There are many open questions pertaining to the statistical analysis of random objects, which are increasingly encountered. A major challenge is the absence of linear operations in such spaces. A basic statistical task is to quantify statistical dispersion or spread. For two measures of dispersion for data objects in geodesic metric spaces, Frechet variance and metric variance, a central limit theorem is derived for their joint distribution. This analysis reveals that the Alexandrov curvature of the geodesic space determines the relationship between these two dispersion measures. This suggests a novel test for inferring the curvature of a space based on the asymptotic distribution of the dispersion measures. The test can be employed to detect the intrinsic curvature of an unknown underlying space, which emerges as a joint property of the space and the underlying probability measure that generates the random objects. The asymptotic properties of the test and its finite-sample behavior are investigated for various data types, including distributional data and point cloud data. The proposed inference for intrinsic curvature of random objects is illustrated using gait synchronization data represented as symmetric positive definite matrices and energy compositional data on the sphere.
