applied functional data analysis methods and case studies

… the authors have done a commendable job of exposing functional data analysis through a wide variety of examples chosen from diverse fields …. This book will surely attract more people into the area of functional data analysis. They really make the book a very enjoyable reading. … Examples discussed in the book are extremely well chosen. 'Analysis of functional data has become a very active area of research in statistics. Of course, manyofourcasestudiesrequireddevelopmentofexistingmethodology,and readersshouldgaintheabilitytoadaptmethodstotheirownproblemstoo. 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. Nevertheless we have tried to give a ?avor of the range of meth- ology we ourselves have considered. 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. These include criminology, economics, archaeology, rheumatology, psych- ogy, neurophysiology, auxology (the study of human growth), meteorology, biomechanics, and education-and also a study of a juggling statistician. 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. At the same time, both of us rapidly became involved in relevant new research involving many colleagues in ?elds outside statistics. 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.

Applied functional data analysis methods and case studies