Abstract

The progress of technologies (connecting objects, monitoring devices, sensors, remote sensing, neuroimaging, etc) allow to collect data containing some continuum. The continuum may concerns the time or space but not only. In some situations the continuum may come from multiple sources. Consequently, a statistical unit may be a curve, a surface or any more complex mathematical object presenting some continuum feature. Such hi-tech data are called functional data, where the word "functional" is the natural mathematical concept for handling continuum. The challenge is simple: extracting relevant information from datasets containing collections of curves, or surfaces or any other complex objects, often combined with standard multivariate variables. All methodologies dealing with such functional data are gathered under the terminology Functional Data Analysis (FDA). The success of this exciting modern area of Statistics is mainly due to its ability to solve major engineering challenges coming from modern domains of applications (biology, biomechanics, chemometrics, econometrics, environmental management, geophysics, medical sciences, industry, etc) while raising new fundamental statistical issues.

The main aim of this IPS is to consolidate the role of FDA in the Statistical World Community while promoting its impact on real life concerns. To this end, I invited five outstanding experts of FDA community, coming from different countries (Australia, Canada, UK, US), able to present a wide scope of FDA methodologies with a special attention on motivating application. The complementary goal of this session is to reach a wide audience by presenting a set of interesting applications demonstrating the usefulness of functional data analysis: