Joint classification and prediction of random curves using heavy‐tailed process functional regression

Abstract

We propose a heavy-tailed process functional regression to jointly perform classification and prediction of time-varying functional data. We use two independent scale mixtures of Gaussian Processes to respectively model random effects and random errors, yielding robust inferences against both magnitude and shape outliers. We classify random curves by posterior predictive probabilities of class labels and offer a weighted prediction of future curve trends. A Bayesian estimation procedure is implemented through an MCMC sampling algorithm. The performance of classification and prediction of the proposed model is evaluated using simulated studies and some real data sets.