Adjogou, Adjobo Folly Dzigbodi
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Faculty of Arts and Science - Department of Mathematics and Statistics
André-Aisenstadt
Courriels
Courses
- STT1682 A - Progiciels statistiq/actuariat
Research area
Student supervision Expand all Collapse all
Analyse statistique de données fonctionnelles à structures complexes
Theses and supervised dissertations / 2017-05
Adjogou, Adjobo Folly Dzigbodi
Abstract
Abstract
Longitudinal studies play a salient role in many and various research areas and their relevance
is still increasing. The related methods have become a privileged tool for analyzing the
evolution of a given phenomenon across time. Longitudinal data arise when measurements
for one or more variables are taken at different points of a temporal axis on individuals
involved in the study. A key feature of such type of data is that observations within the
same subject may be correlated. That fundamental characteristic makes longitudinal data
different from other types of data in statistics and motivates specific methodologies. There
has been remarkable developments in that field in the past forty years. Typical analysis of
longitudinal data relies on parametric, non-parametric or semi-parametric models. However,
an important question widely addressed in the analysis of longitudinal data is related to
cluster analysis and concerns the existence of groups or clusters (or homogeneous trajectories),
suggested by the data, not defined a priori, such that individuals in a given cluster
tend to be similar to each other in some sense, and individuals in different clusters tend to be
dissimilar. This thesis aims at contributing to that rapidly expanding field of clustering longitudinal
data. Indeed, an emerging non-parametric methodology for modeling longitudinal
data is based on the functional data analysis approach in which longitudinal trajectories are
viewed as a sample of partially observed functions or curves on some interval where these
functions are often assumed to be smooth. We then propose in the present thesis, a succinct
review of the most commonly used methods to analyze and cluster longitudinal data and
two new model-based functional clustering methods. Indeed, we review most of the typical
longitudinal data analysis models ranging from the parametric models to the semi and non
parametric ones, as well as the recent developments in longitudinal cluster analysis according
to the two main approaches : non-parametric and model-based. The purpose of that review
is to provide a concise, broad and readily accessible overview of longitudinal data analysis
and clustering methods. In the first method developed in this thesis, we use the functional
data analysis approach to propose a very flexible model which combines functional principal
components analysis and clustering to deal with any type of longitudinal data, even if the observations are sparse, irregularly spaced or occur at different time points for each individual.
The functional modeling is based on splines and the main data groups are modeled
as arising from clusters in the space of spline coefficients. The model, based on a mixture
of Student’s t-distributions, is embedded into a Bayesian framework in which maximum a
posteriori estimators are found with the EM algorithm. We develop an approximation of
the marginal log-likelihood (MLL) that allows us to perform an MLL based model selection
and that compares favourably with other popular criteria such as AIC and BIC. In the
second method, we propose a new time-course or longitudinal data analysis framework that
aims at combining functional model-based clustering and the Lasso penalization to identify
groups of individuals with similar patterns. An EM algorithm-based approach is used on a
functional modeling where the individual curves are approximated into a space spanned by a
finite basis of B-splines and the number of clusters is determined by penalizing a mixture of
Student’s t-distributions with unknown degrees of freedom. The Latin Hypercube Sampling
is used to efficiently explore the space of penalization parameters. For both methodologies,
the estimation of the parameters is based on the iterative expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm.