University of Alberta FUNCTIONAL DATA ANALYSIS WITH APPLICATION TO MS AND CERVICAL VERTEBRAE DATA

Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Library to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatever without the author’s prior written permission. To my husband John for his great encouragement and support Functional data analysis (FDA) is a fast-growing area in statistics with the aim of estimating a set of related functions or curves rather than focusing on a single entity, like estimating a point, as in classical statistics. FDA has a wide range of applications in different fields such as biological sciences, geology, psychology, economics, imag