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Abstract With the advance of science and technology, more and more data are collected in the form of functions. A fundamental question for a pair of random functions is to test whether they are independent. This problem becomes quite challenging when the random trajectories are sampled irregularly and sparsely for each subject. In other words, each random function is only sampled at a few time-points, and these time-points vary with subjects. Furthermore, the observed data may contain noise. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no consistent test in the literature to test the independence of sparsely observed functional data. We show in this work that testing pointwise independence simultaneously is feasible. The test statistics are constructed by integrating pointwise distance covariances (Székely et al., 2007) and are shown to converge, at a certain rate, to their corresponding population counterparts, which characterize the simultaneous pointwise independence of two random functions. The performance of the proposed methods is further verified by Monte Carlo simulations and analysis of real data. 

Despite their widespread success, the application of deep neural networks to functional data remains scarce today. The infinite dimensionality of functional data means standard learning algorithms can be applied only after appropriate dimension reduction, typically achieved via basis expansions. Currently, these bases are chosen a priori without the information for the task at hand and thus may not be effective for the designated task. We instead propose to adaptively learn these bases in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce neural networks that employ a new Basis Layer whose hidden units are each basis functions themselves implemented as a micro neural network. Our architecture learns to apply parsimonious dimension reduction to functional inputs that focuses only on information relevant to the target rather than irrelevant variation in the input function. Across numerous classification/regression tasks with functional data, our method empirically outperforms other types of neural networks, and we prove that our approach is statistically consistent with low generalization error.