Identifying arbitrary transformation between the slopes in functional regression

Abstract: In this article, we study whether the slope functions of two functional regression models in two samples are associated with any arbitrary transformation (barring constant and linear transformation) or not along the vertical axis. In order to address this issue, a statistical testing of the hypothesis problem is formalized, and the test statistic is formed based on the estimated second derivative of the unknown transformation. The asymptotic properties of the test statistics are investigated using some advanced techniques related to the empirical process. Moreover, to implement the test for small sample size data, a Bootstrap algorithm is proposed, and it is shown that the Bootstrap version of the test is as good as the original test for sufficiently large sample size. Furthermore, the utility of the proposed methodology is shown for simulated data sets, and DTI data is analyzed using this methodology.