Functional Data Analysis and Its Applications

This course aims to introduce the modern field of functional data analysis to a general audience with the emphasis on how the relevant techniques can be applied to real examples. As a a generalization of the traditional data concepts from numbers and vectors of numbers to curves and surfaces, functional data has attracted a lot of attention from statisticians and found many interesting applications in a variety of fields in the past decades. The course will start with the introduction of real examples for functional data. Based on these examples, common functional data analysis techniques such as function smoothing, functional principal component analysis, and functional linear regression models will be presented. R implementation of these techniques will be introduced and demonstrated.