This month’s Stats Society talk is by Professor Aurore Delaigle from the University of Melbourne. Details appear below. Cheers, Michael ==== Date: Tuesday, 21 April 2015 Time: 6:00pm - 6.30pm: Refreshments 6:30pm - 7.30pm: Lecture 7:45pm - onwards: Dinner (at a nearby restaurant, TBC) Venue: Room 301, Level 3, University of Technology, Sydney - Building 11, 81-115 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007 Prof. Aurore Delaigle University of Melbourne, Australia An introduction to functional data analysis Functional data are data that are not in the form of variables or vectors, but rather in the form of curves. Examples of functional data are growth curves of children, spectra, speech curves, etc. In this talk I will give an introduction to functional data, and introduce techniques that can be applied to analyse such data. The infinite dimension of functional data can challenge conventional methods, and often a first step is to reduce the problem to a finite-dimensional one, which can be done in a variety of ways, for example through principal components. I will talk about such approaches and illustrate the resulting methods on some real data examples. Biography of Prof. Aurore Delaigle Aurore Delaigle graduated from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. After spending three years at the University of California, she moved to the University of Bristol in the UK, and then to the University of Melbourne in Australia. She is particularly interested in nonparametric statistics, functional data, and problems involving imprecise observations.