Almost as soon as we had completed our previous book Functional Data Analysis in 1997, it became clear that potential interest in the ?eld was far wider than the audience for the thematic presentation we had given there. At the same time, both of us rapidly became involved in relevant new research involving many colleagues in ?elds outside statistics. This book treats the ?eld in a di?erent way, by considering case st- ies arising from our own collaborative research to illustrate how functional data analysis ideas work out in practice in a diverse range of subject areas. These include criminology, economics, archaeology, rheumatology, psych- ogy, neurophysiology, auxology (the study of human growth), meteorology, biomechanics, and educationand also a study of a juggling statistician. Obviously such an approach will not cover the ?eld exhaustively, and in any case functional data analysis is not a hard-edged closed system of thought. Nevertheless we have tried to give a ?avor of the range of meth- ology we ourselves have considered. We hope that our personal experience, including the fun we had working on these projects, will inspire others to extend functional thinking to many other statistical contexts. Of course, manyofourcasestudiesrequireddevelopmentofexistingmethodology,and readersshouldgaintheabilitytoadaptmethodstotheirownproblemstoo.

Functional data analysis is a new area of statistical research, and these two leading figures present the first collection of methods in book-form. Much of the work is original to the authors. Bernard Silverman has been very successful in writing books at a level and a style that appeals to theoretical and applied audiences.

Klappentext

What do juggling, old bones, criminal careers and human growth patterns have in common? They all give rise to functional data, that come in the form of curves or functions rather than the numbers, or vectors of numbers, that are considered in conventional statistics. The authors' highly acclaimed book Functional Data Analysis (1997) presented a thematic approach to the statistical analysis of such data. By contrast, the present book introduces and explores the ideas of functional data analysis by the consideration of a number of case studies, many of them presented for the first time. The two books are complementary but neither is a prerequisite for the other. The case studies are accessible to research workers in a wide range of disciplines. Every reader, whether experienced researcher or graduate student, should gain not only a specific understanding of the methods of functional data analysis, but more importantly a general insight into the underlying patterns of thought. Some of the studies demand the development of novel aspects of the methodology of functional data analysis, but technical details aimed at the specialist statistician are confined to sections which the more general reader can safely omit. There is an associated web site with MATLABr and S?PLUSr implementations of the methods discussed, together with all the data sets that are not proprietary. Jim Ramsay is Professor of Psychology at McGill University, and is an international authority on many aspects of multivariate analysis. He was elected President of the Statistical Society of Canada for the term 2002-3 and is a holder of the Society's Gold Medal for his work in functional data analysis. His statistical work draws on his collaborations with researchers in speech articulation, biomechanics,

Inhalt
Introduction * Life Course Data in Criminology * The Nondurable Goods Index * Bone Shapes from a Paleopathology Study * Modeling Reaction Time Distributions * Zooming in on Human Growth * Time Warping Handwriting and Weather Records * How do Bone Shapes Indicate Arthritis? * Functional Models for Test Items * Predicting Lip Acceleration from Electromyography * The Dynamics of Handwriting Printed Characters * A Differential Equation for Juggling