Functional Principal Components Analysis of Spatially Correlated Data

Abstract: This paper focuses on the analysis of spatially correlated functional data. The between-curve correlation is modeled by correlating functional principal component scores of the functional data. We propose a Spatial Principal Analysis by Conditional Expectation framework to explicitly estimate spatial correlations and reconstruct individual curves. This approach works even when the observed data per curve are sparse. Assuming spatial stationarity, empirical spatial correlations are calculated as the ratio of eigenvalues of the smoothed covariance surface $Cov(X_i(s),X_i(t))$ and cross-covariance surface $Cov(X_i(s), X_j(t))$ at locations indexed by $i$ and $j$. Then a anisotropy Mat\'ern spatial correlation model is fit to empirical correlations. Finally, principal component scores are estimated to reconstruct the sparsely observed curves. This framework can naturally accommodate arbitrary covariance structures, but there is an enormous reduction in computation if one can assume the separability of temporal and spatial components. We propose hypothesis tests to examine the separability as well as the isotropy effect of spatial correlation. Simulation studies and applications of empirical data show improvements in the curve reconstruction using our framework over the method where curves are assumed to be independent. In addition, we show that the asymptotic properties of estimates in uncorrelated case still hold in our case if 'mild' spatial correlation is assumed.