Functional repeated measures analysis of variance and its application

This paper is inspired by medical studies in which the same patients with multiple sclerosis are examined at several successive visits (doctor’s appointments) and described by fractional anisotropy tract profiles, which can be represented as f unctions. Since the observations for each patient are dependent random processes, they follow a repeated measures design for functional data. To compare the results for different visits, we thus consider functional repeated measures analysis of variance. For this purpose, a pointwise test statistic is constructed by adapting the classical test statistic for one-way repeated measures analysis of variance to the functional data framework. By integrating and taking the supremum of the pointwise test statistic, we create two global test statistics. In addition to verifying the general null hypothesis of the equality of mean functions corresponding to different objects, we also propose a simple method for post hoc analysis. We illustrate the finite sample properties of permutation and bootstrap testing procedures in an extensive simulation study. Finally, we analyze a real data example in detail. All methods are implemented in the R package rmfanova, available on CRAN.