Short time evolutions can be analysed by estimating each individual trajectory as a smooth spline through time.
Variables are representative of the underlying process and evolve smoothly through time.
Observations and measurements are noisy realisations of these underlying smooth functions of time.
Once each individual trajectory is estimated, the smooth curves become the new observational unit for further data analysis such as estimation of group curves and identification of time profiles significantly altered between groups.
The present approach is resilient to:
Data can be imported using a CSV file containing the raw data or a .RData file with the data and metaData dataframe. Previously fitted data can also be directly loaded for further analysis or plotting.
A CSV file with observations as rows and metadata (time, individual, group(s) of observations) and data (variables to fit) as columns. First row is the column name.
A .RData file containing 2 data.frame inData and inMeta.
A .RData file containing the input data as well as the result of fit as generated by the export function.
The degree of freedom (DF) parameter controls how closely the spline fits the input data (controlling overfitting).
This parameter is dependent on the study design (number of time-points, sampling rate, time-scale of the function of time under study) and therefore only needs to be selected once per dataset.
DF Search helps choose an adequate DF to apply across all variables for a given dataset:
Once the data imported, each variable can be fitted:
Input data, fitted data, as well as selected variables can be saved.
The present software is licensed under GPLv3.
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License for more details. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/