The PI develops a systematic body of methods and related theory on inference of temporally dependent functional data. The basic tool is the self-normalization (SN), a new studentizing technique developed recently in the univariate time series setting. The PI proposes to advance new SN-based methods in functional setup and develop (i) a class of SN-based test statistics to test for a change point in the mean function and dependent structure of weakly dependent functional data; (ii) a class of SN-based test statistics to test for white noise in Hilbert space and effective diagnostic checking tools for the AR(1) model in functional space; (iii) new SN-based tests in the two sample setup. The tests can be used to check if the two possibly dependent functional time series have the same mean and/or autocovariance structure. In this proposal, the SN is the foundation on which the body of connected and systematic inference methods for temporally dependent functional data is built.
The proposal is motivated by ongoing collaboration with atmospheric scientists on statistical assessment of properties of numerical model outputs as compared to real observations. To study climate change, which is one of the most urgent problems facing the world this century, scientists have relied primarily on climate projections from numerical climate models. There is currently a major interest to study how different the numerical model outputs are from real observations and the characterization of their difference. Analyzing these data are quite challenging because they are massive and highly complex with intricate spatial-temporal dependence. The SN-based inference methods that the PI develops in this proposal address these issues. With the assistance of functional principal component analysis, the SN-based methods are able to handle massive data sets with dependence, because the methods automatically take the unknown weak dependence into account, do not involve the choice of any tuning parameters (so are quite efficient computationally),  and are very straightforward to implement with asymptotically pivotal limiting distributions. A direct application of the SN-based methods to climate data is expected to help atmospheric scientists gain a better understanding of the ability of numerical model outputs in mimicking real observations. In addition, the proposed methods will have broad direct applications to data that are obtained from very precise measurements at fine temporal scales which frequently arise in engineering, physical science and finance. On the educational front, the PI will develop new advanced topic courses, mentor undergraduate and graduate students and expose them to the state-of-the-art research in this project.
