A Two Sample Test for Functional Data

We consider testing equality of mean functions from two samples of functional data. A novel test based on the adaptive Neyman methodology applied to the Hotelling’s T-squared statistic is proposed. Under the enlarged null hypothesis that the distributions of the two populations are the same, randomization methods are proposed to find a null distribution which gives accurate significance levels. An extensive simulation study is presented which shows that the proposed test works very well in comparison with several other methods under a variety of alternatives and is one of the best methods for all alternatives, whereas the other methods all show weak power at some alternatives. An application to a real-world data set demonstrates the applicability of the method.