A Principal Component Analysis for Trees

The active field of Functional Data Analysis (about understanding the variation in a set of curves) has been recently extended to Object Oriented Data Analysis, which considers populations of more general objects. A particularly challenging extension of this set of ideas is to populations of tree-structured objects. We develop an analog of Principal Component Analysis for trees, based on the notion of tree-lines, and propose numerically fast (linear time) algorithms to solve the resulting optimization problems. The solutions we obtain are used in the analysis of a data set of 73 individuals, where each data object is a tree of blood vessels in one person's brain.