A Study of Functional Depths

Abstract: Functional depth is used for ranking functional observations from most outlying to most typical. The ranks produced by functional depth have been proposed as the basis for functional classifiers, rank tests, and data visualization procedures. Many of the proposed functional depths are invariant to domain permutation, an unusual property for a functional data analysis procedure. Essentially these depths treat functional data as if it were multivariate data. In this work, we compare the performance of several existing functional depths to a simple adaptation of an existing multivariate depth notion, $L^\infty$ depth ($L^{\infty}D$). On simulated and real data, we show $L^{\infty}D$ has performance comparable or superior to several existing notions of functional depth. In addition, we review how depth functions are evaluated and propose some improvements. In particular, we show that empirical depth function asymptotics can be mis--leading and instead propose a new method, the rank--rank plot, for evaluating empirical depth rank stability.