Functional Data Analysis
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loginThis book continues in the footsteps of the First Edition in being a snapshot of a highly social, and therefore decidedly unpredictable, process. Thecombined personal view of functional data analysis that it presents has emerged over a number of years of research and contact, and has been greatly nourished by delightful collaborations with many friends. We hope that readers will enjoy the book as much as we have enjoyed writing it, whether they are our colleagues as re searchers or applied data analysts reading the book as a research monograph, or students using it as a course text.
As in the First Edition, live data are used throughout for both motivation and illustration, showing how functional approaches allow us to see new things, especially by exploiting the smoothness of the processes generating the data. The data sets exemplify the wide scope of functional data analysis;
they are drawn from growth analysis, meteorology, biomechanics, equine science, economics and medicine.
“Back to the data” was the heading to the last section of the First Edition. We did not know then how well those words would predict the next eight years. Since then we have seen functional data applications in more scientific and industrial settings than we could have imagined, and so we
wanted an opportunity to make this new field accessible to a wider readership than the the first volume seemed to permit. Our book of case studies, Ramsay and Silverman (2002), was our first response, but we have known for some time that a new edition of our original volume was also required.
