Combined Analysis of Amplitude and Phase Variations in Functional Data

When functional data manifest amplitude and phase variations, a commonly-employed framework for analyzing them is to take away the phase variation through a function alignment and then to apply standard tools to the aligned functions. A downside of this approach is that the important variations contained in the phases are completely ignored. To combine both of amplitude and phase variations, we propose a variant of principal component analysis (PCA) that captures non-linear components representing the amplitude, phase and their associations simultaneously. The proposed method, which we call functional combined PCA, is aimed to provide more efficient dimension reduction with interpretable components, in particular when the amplitudes and phases are clearly associated. We model principal components by non-linearly combining time-warping functions and aligned functions. A data-adaptive weighting procedure helps our dimension reduction to attain a maximal explaining power of observed functions. We also discuss an application of functional canonical correlation analysis in investigation of the correlation structure between the two variations. We show that for two sets of real data the proposed method provides interpretable major non-linear components, which are not typically found in the usual functional PCA.