Warped Functional Analysis of Variance

Abstract: This article presents an Analysis of Variance model for functional data that explicitly incorporates phase variability through a time-warping component, allowing for a unified approach to estimation and inference in presence of amplitude and time variability. The focus is on single-random-factor models but the approach can be easily generalized to more complex ANOVA models. The behavior of the estimators is studied by simulation, and an application to the analysis of growth curves of flour beetles is presented. Although the model assumes a smooth latent process behind the observed trajectories, smoothness of the observed data is not required; the method can be applied to the sparsely observed data that is often encountered in longitudinal studies.