A Two-Sample Distribution-Free Test for Functional Data with Application to a Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study of Multiple Sclerosis
针对成像研究，提出一种非参数检验方法，判断两组离散观测的曲线是否来自同一分布，用于比较健康人与多发性硬化患者的白质纤维束特征，比现有方法更有效。
Summary 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.