A partial overview of the theory of statistics with functional data

The theory and practice of statistical methods in situations where the available data are functions (instead of real numbers or vectors) is often referred to as Functional Data Analysis (FDA). This subject has become increasingly popular from the end of the 1990s and is now a major research field in statistics. m of this expository paper is to offer a short tutorial as well as a partial survey of the state of the art in FDA theory. Both the selection of topics and the references list are far from exhaustive. Many interesting ideas and references have been left out for the sake of brevity and readability. mary, this paper provides:(a) ussion on the nature and treatment of the functional data. ew of some probabilistic tools especially suited for FDA. ussion about how the usual centrality parameters, mean, median and mode, can be defined and estimated in the functional setting. accounts of the main ideas and current literature on regression, classification, dimension reduction and bootstrap methods in FDA. inal comments regarding software for FDA.