Functional Horseshoe Smoothing for Functional Trend Estimation

Abstract

Due to developments in instruments and computers, functional observations are increasingly popular. However, effective methodologies for flexibly estimating the underlying trends with valid uncertainty quantification for a sequence of functional data (e.g. functional time series) are still scarce. In this work, we develop a locally adaptive smoothing method, called functional horseshoe smoothing, by introducing a shrinkage prior to the general order of differences of functional variables. This allows us to capture abrupt changes by making the most of the shrinkage capability and also to assess uncertainty by Bayesian inference. The fully Bayesian framework allows the selection of the number of basis functions via the posterior predictive loss. We provide theoretical properties of the model, which support the shrinkage ability. Also, by taking advantage of the nature of functional data, this method is able to handle heterogeneously observed data without data augmentation. Simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate that the proposed method has desirable properties.