A Two-Sample Distribution-Free Test for Functional Data with Application to a Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study of Multiple Sclerosis
- 9 January 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics
- Vol. 65 (3), 395-414
- https://doi.org/10.1111/rssc.12130
Abstract
Motivated by an imaging study, the paper develops a non-parametric testing procedure for testing the null hypothesis that two samples of curves observed at discrete grids and with noise have the same underlying distribution. The objective is to compare formally white matter tract profiles between healthy individuals and multiple-sclerosis patients, as assessed by conventional diffusion tensor imaging measures. We propose to decompose the curves by using functional principal component analysis of a mixture process, which we refer to as marginal functional principal component analysis. This approach reduces the dimension of the testing problem in a way that enables the use of traditional non-parametric univariate testing procedures. The procedure is computationally efficient and accommodates different sampling designs. Numerical studies are presented to validate the size and power properties of the test in many realistic scenarios. In these cases, the test proposed has been found to be more powerful than its primary competitor. Application to the diffusion tensor imaging data reveals that all the tracts studied are associated with multiple sclerosis and the choice of the diffusion tensor image measurement is important when assessing axonal disruption.Keywords
Funding Information
- AT&T graduate research fellowship
- National Science Foundation (DGE-0946818, DMS 1007466, DMS 0454942, DMS-1358556)
- National Institutes of Health (R01 NS085211, R01 MH086633)
- Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (DMS-1127914)
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