Principal component analysis for Hilbertian functional data

Abstract

In this paper we extend the functional principal component analysis for real-valued random functions to the case of Hilbert-space-valued functional random objects. For this, we introduce an autocovariance operator acting on the space of real-valued functions. We establish an eigendecomposition of the autocovariance operator and a Karuhnen-Loeve expansion. We propose the estimators of the eigenfunctions and the functional principal component scores, and investigate the rates of convergence of the estimators to their targets. We detail the implementation of the methodology for the cases of compositional vectors and density functions, and illustrate the method by analyzing time-varying population composition data. We also discuss an extension of the methodology to multivariate cases and develop the corresponding theory.