Statistics for Functional Data

Functional data analysis is an active field of research in Statistics. This Special Issue on Statistics for Functional Data contains a selected set of contributions which covers a scope, as wide as possible, of this many-facetted discipline. The diversity of this field of statistics is highlighted by the wide scope of methodological problems discussed in this special issue. Also, the large set of applied scientific disciplines concerned with functional data appears through the numerous curves data set analyzed in these contributions. This introductory paper presents these contributions by emphasizing on how they are taking place in the actual development of statistical methods for analyzing functional data. A special, but not exclusive, place is given to the three more current kinds of problems: factorial analysis of functional data, regression with functional variables and curves classification. The links between functional data analysis and nonparametric statistics deserve a special attention.