Extremes of projections of functional time series on data–driven basis systems

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the extreme behavior of projections of time series of functions onto data-driven basis systems, for example, on the estimated functional principal components. The coefficients of these projections, called the scores, encode the shapes of the curves. Within the framework of functional data analysis, the extreme shapes are those corresponding to multivariate extremes of the scores. The scores are not directly observable, and must be computed from the data. Even for iid Gaussian functions, they form a triangular array of dependent non–Gaussian vectors. Thus, even though the extreme behavior of the population scores of Gaussian functions follows from well–known results, it is not clear what the extreme behavior of their approximations computed from the data is. We clarify these issues for Gaussian functions and for more general functional time series whose projections are in the Gumbel domain of attraction.