Phase-Amplitude Separation and Modeling of Spherical Trajectories

ABSTRACT The problems of analysis and modeling of spherical trajectories, that is, continuous longitudinal data on , are important in several disciplines. These problems are challenging for two reasons: (1) nonlinear geometry of and (2) the presence of phase variability in given data. This article develops a geometric framework for separating phase variability from given trajectories, leaving only the shape or the amplitude variability. The key idea is to represent each trajectory with a pair of variables, a starting point, and a transported square-root velocity curve (TSRVC), a curve in the tangent (vector) space at the starting point. The space of all such curves forms a vector bundle and the norm, along with the standard Riemannian metric on , provides a natural, warping-invariant metric on this vector bundle. This leads to an efficient algorithm for registration of trajectories, that is, phase-amplitude separation, and computational tools, such as clustering, sample means, and principal component analysis (PCA) of the two components separately. It also helps derive simple statistical models of phase-amplitude components of spherical trajectories. This comprehensive framework is demonstrated using two datasets: a set of bird-migration trajectories and a set of hurricane paths in the Atlantic ocean. Supplementary material for this article is available online.