Functional data analyses typically proceed by smoothing, followed by functional PCA. This paradigm implicitly assumes that rough variation is due to nuisance noise. Nevertheless, relevant functional features such as time-localised or short scale fluctuations may indeed be rough relative to the global scale, but still smooth at shorter scales. These may be confounded with the global smooth components of variation by the smoothing and PCA, potentially distorting the parsimony and interpretability of the analysis. The goal of this paper is to investigate how both smooth and rough variations can be recovered on the basis of discretely observed functional data. Assuming that a functional datum arises as the sum of two uncorrelated components, one smooth and one rough, we develop identifiability conditions for the recovery of the two corresponding covariance operators.The key insight is that they should possess complementary forms of parsimony: one smooth and finite rank (large scale), and the other banded and potentially infinite rank (small scale). Our conditions elucidate the precise interplay between rank, bandwidth, and grid resolution. Under these conditions, we show that the recovery problem is equivalent to rank-constrained matrix completion, and exploit this to construct estimators of the two covariances, without assuming knowledge of the true bandwidth or rank; we study their asymptotic behaviour, and then use them to recover the smooth and rough components of each functional datum by best linear prediction. As a result, we effectively produce separate functional PCAs for smooth and rough variation.

We consider nonparametric estimation of a covariance function on the unit square, given a sample of discretely observed fragments of functional data. When each sample path is only observed on a subinterval of length δ < 1, one has no statistical information on the unknown covariance outside a δ-band around the diagonal. The problem seems unidentifiable without parametric assumptions, but we show that nonparametric estimation is feasible under suitable smoothness and rank conditions on the unknown covariance. This remains true even when observation is discrete, and we give precise deterministic conditions on how fine the observation grid needs to be relative to the rank and fragment length for identifiability to hold true. We show that our conditions translate the estimation problem to a low-rank matrix completion problem, construct a nonparametric estimator in this vein, and study its asymptotic properties. We illustrate the numerical performance of our method on real and simulated data.

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Estimating the first-order intensity function in point pattern analysis is an important problem, and it has been approached so far from different perspectives: parametrically, semiparametrically or nonparametrically. Our approach is close to a semiparametric one. Motivated by eye-movement data, we introduce a convolution type model where the logintensity is modelled as the convolution of a function β(•), to be estimated, and a single spatial covariate (the image an individual is looking at for eye-movement data). Based on a Fourier series expansion, we show that the proposed model is related to the log-linear model with infinite number of coefficients, which correspond to the spectral decomposition of β(•). After truncation, we estimate these coefficients through a penalized Poisson likelihood and prove infill asymptotic results for a large class of spatial point processes. We illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology on simulated data and real data.