Efficient Multidimensional Functional Data Analysis Using Marginal Product Basis Systems

Many modern datasets, from areas such as neuroimaging and geostatistics, come in the form of a random sample of tensor-valued data which can be understood as noisy observations of a smooth multidimensional random function. Most of the traditional techniques from functional data analysis are plagued by the curse of dimensionality and quickly become intractable as the dimension of the domain increases. In this paper, we propose a framework for learning continuous representations from a sample of multidimensional functional data that is immune to several manifestations of the curse. These representations are constructed using a set of separable basis functions that are defined to be optimally adapted to the data. We show that the resulting estimation problem can be solved efficiently by the tensor decomposition of a carefully defined reduction transformation of the observed data. Roughness-based regularization is incorporated using a class of differential operator-based penalties. Relevant theoretical properties are also established. The advantages of our method over competing methods are demonstrated in a simulation study. We conclude with a real data application in neuroimaging.