Robust function-on-function interaction regression

Abstract: A function-on-function regression model with quadratic and interaction effects of the covariates provides a more flexible model. Despite several attempts to estimate the model's parameters, almost all existing estimation strategies are non-robust against outliers. Outliers in the quadratic and interaction effects may deteriorate the model structure more severely than their effects in the main effect. We propose a robust estimation strategy based on the robust functional principal component decomposition of the function-valued variables and $\tau$-estimator. The performance of the proposed method relies on the truncation parameters in the robust functional principal component decomposition of the function-valued variables. A robust Bayesian information criterion is used to determine the optimum truncation constants. A forward stepwise variable selection procedure is employed to determine relevant main, quadratic, and interaction effects to address a possible model misspecification. The finite-sample performance of the proposed method is investigated via a series of Monte-Carlo experiments. The proposed method's asymptotic consistency and influence function are also studied in the supplement, and its empirical performance is further investigated using a U.S. COVID-19 dataset.