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Industrial applications often exhibit multiple in-control patterns due to varying operating conditions, which makes a single functional linear model (FLM) inadequate to capture the complexity of the true relationship between a functional quality characteristic and covariates, which gives rise to the multimode profile monitoring problem. This issue is clearly illustrated in the resistance spot welding (RSW) process in the automotive industry, where different operating conditions lead to multiple in-control states. In these states, factors such as electrode tip wear and dressing may influence the functional quality characteristic differently, resulting in distinct FLMs across subpopulations. To address this problem, this article introduces the functional mixture regression control chart (FMRCC) to monitor functional quality characteristics with multiple in-control patterns and covariate information, modeled using a mixture of FLMs. A monitoring strategy based on the likelihood ratio test is proposed to monitor any deviation from the estimated in-control heterogeneous population. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to compare the FMRCC with competing monitoring schemes that have already appeared in the literature, and a case study in the monitoring of an RSW process in the automotive industry, which motivated this research, illustrates its practical applicability.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a fundamental tool for analyzing multivariate data. Here the focus is on dimension reduction to the principal subspace, characterized by its projection matrix. The classical principal subspace can be strongly affected by the presence of outliers. Traditional robust approaches consider casewise outliers, that is, cases generated by an unspecified outlier distribution that differs from that of the clean cases. But there may also be cellwise outliers, which are suspicious entries that can occur anywhere in the data matrix. Another common issue is that some cells may be missing. This paper proposes a new robust PCA method, called cellPCA, that can simultaneously deal with casewise outliers, cellwise outliers, and missing cells. Its single objective function combines two robust loss functions, that together mitigate the effect of casewise and cellwise outliers. The objective function is minimized by an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm. Residual cellmaps and enhanced outlier maps are proposed for outlier detection. The casewise and cellwise influence functions of the principal subspace are derived, and its asymptotic distribution is obtained. Extensive simulations and two real data examples illustrate the performance of cellPCA.

In many modern industrial scenarios, the measurements of the quality characteristics of interest are often required to be represented as functional data or profiles. This motivates the growing interest in extending traditional univariate statistical process monitoring (SPM) schemes to the functional data setting. This article proposes a new SPM scheme, which is referred to as adaptive multivariate functional EWMA (AMFEWMA), to extend the well-known exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart from the univariate scalar to the multivariate functional setting. The favorable performance of the AMFEWMA control chart over existing methods is assessed via an extensive Monte Carlo simulation. Its practical applicability is demonstrated through a case study in the monitoring of the quality of a resistance spot welding process in the automotive industry through the online observations of dynamic resistance curves, which are associated with multiple spot welds on the same car body and recognized as the full technological signature of the process.

Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (MSSA) is a powerful and widely used nonparametric method for multivariate time series, which allows the analysis of complex temporal data from diverse fields such as finance, healthcare, ecology, and engineering. However, MSSA lacks robustness against outliers because it relies on the singular value decomposition, which is very sensitive to the presence of anomalous values. MSSA can then give biased results and lead to erroneous conclusions. In this paper a new MSSA method is proposed, named RObust Diagonalwise Estimation of SSA (RODESSA), which is robust against the presence of cellwise and casewise outliers. In particular, the decomposition step of MSSA is replaced by a new robust low-rank approximation of the trajectory matrix that takes its special structure into account. A fast algorithm is constructed, and it is proved that each iteration step decreases the objective function. In order to visualize different types of outliers, a new graphical display is introduced, called an enhanced time series plot. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to compare RODESSA with competing approaches in the literature. A real data example about temperature analysis in passenger railway vehicles demonstrates the practical utility of the proposed approach.

Modern statistical process monitoring (SPM) applications focus on profile monitoring, i.e., the monitoring of process quality characteristics that can be modeled as profiles, also known as functional data. Despite the large interest in the profile monitoring literature, there is still a lack of software to facilitate its practical application. This article introduces the funcharts R package that implements recent developments on the SPM of multivariate functional quality characteristics, possibly adjusted by the influence of additional variables, referred to as covariates. The package also implements the real-time version of all control charting procedures to monitor profiles partially observed up to an intermediate domain point. The package is illustrated both through its built-in data generator and a real-case study on the SPM of Ro-Pax ship CO2 emissions during navigation, which is based on the ShipNavigation data provided in the Supplementary Material.

In modern Industry 4.0 applications, a huge amount of data is acquired during manufacturing processes that are often contaminated with anomalous observations in the form of both casewise and cellwise outliers. These can seriously reduce the performance of control charting procedures, especially in complex and high-dimensional settings. To mitigate this issue in the context of profile monitoring, we propose a new framework, referred to as robust multivariate functional control chart (RoMFCC), that is able to monitor multivariate functional data while being robust to both functional casewise and cellwise outliers. The RoMFCC relies on four main elements: (I) a functional univariate filter to identify functional cellwise outliers to be replaced by missing components; (II) a robust multivariate functional data imputation method of missing values; (III) a casewise robust dimensionality reduction; (IV) a monitoring strategy for the multivariate functional quality characteristic. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to compare the RoMFCC with competing monitoring schemes already appeared in the literature. Finally, a motivating real-case study is presented where the proposed framework is used to monitor a resistance spot welding process in the automotive industry.

With the rise of Industry 4.0, huge amounts of data are now generated that are apt to be modelled as functional data. In this setting, standard profile monitoring methods aim to assess the stability over time of a completely observed functional quality characteristic. However, in some practical situations, evaluating the process state in real-time, i.e., as the process is running, could be of great interest to significantly improve the effectiveness of monitoring. To this aim, we propose a new method, referred to as functional real-time monitoring (FRTM), that is able to account for both phase and amplitude variation through the following steps: (i) registration; (ii) dimensionality reduction; (iii) monitoring of a partially observed functional quality characteristic. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to quantify the performance of FRTM with respect to two competing methods. Finally, an example is presented where the proposed method is used to monitor batches from a penicillin production process in real-time.

The development of data acquisition systems is facilitating the collection of data that are apt to be modelled as functional data. In some applications, the interest lies in the identification of significant differences in group functional means defined by varying experimental conditions, which is known as functional analysis of variance (FANOVA). With real data, it is common that the sample under study is contaminated by some outliers, which can strongly bias the analysis. In this paper, we propose a new robust nonparametric functional ANOVA method (RoFANOVA) that reduces the weights of outlying functional data on the results of the analysis. It is implemented through a permutation test based on a test statistic obtained via a functional extension of the classical robust $ M $-estimator. By means of an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study, the proposed test is compared with some alternatives already presented in the literature, in both one-way and two-way designs. The performance of the RoFANOVA is demonstrated in the framework of a motivating real-case study in the field of additive manufacturing that deals with the analysis of spatter ejections. The RoFANOVA method is implemented in the R package rofanova, available online at https://github.com/unina-sfere/rofanova.

In this paper, we propose an adaptive smoothing spline (AdaSS) estimator for the function-on-function linear regression model where each value of the response, at any domain point, depends on the full trajectory of the predictor. The AdaSS estimator is obtained by the optimization of an objective function with two spatially adaptive penalties, based on initial estimates of the partial derivatives of the regression coefficient function. This allows the proposed estimator to adapt more easily to the true coefficient function over regions of large curvature and not to be undersmoothed over the remaining part of the domain. A novel evolutionary algorithm is developed ad hoc to obtain the optimization tuning parameters. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out to compare the AdaSS estimator with competitors that have already appeared in the literature before. The results show that our proposal mostly outperforms the competitor in terms of estimation and prediction accuracy. Lastly, those advantages are illustrated also on two real-data benchmark examples.

Quality assessment of resistance spot welding (RSW) joints of metal sheets in the automotive industry is typically based on costly and lengthy off-line tests that are unfeasible on the full production, especially on large scale. However, the massive industrial digitalization triggered by the industry 4.0 framework makes available, for every produced joint, on-line RSW process parameters, such as, in particular, the so-called dynamic resistance curve (DRC), which is recognized as the full technological signature of the spot welds. Motivated by this context, the present paper means to show the potentiality and the practical applicability to clustering methods of the functional data approach that avoids the need for arbitrary and often controversial feature extraction to find out homogeneous groups of DRCs, which likely pertain to spot welds sharing common mechanical and metallurgical properties. We intend is to provide an essential hands-on overview of the most promising functional clustering methods, and to apply the latter to the DRCs collected from the RSW process at hand, even if they could go far beyond the specific application hereby investigated. The methods analyzed are demonstrated to possibly support practitioners along the identification of the mapping relationship between process parameters and the final quality of RSW joints as well as, more specifically, along the priority assignment for off-line testing of welded spots and the welding tool wear analysis. The analysis code, that has been developed through the software environment R, and the DRC data set are made openly available online at https://github.com/unina-sfere/funclustRSW/

A new estimator, named S-LASSO, is proposed for the coefficient function of the Function-on-Function linear regression model. The S-LASSO estimator is shown to be able to increase the interpretability of the model, by better locating regions where the coefficient function is zero, and to smoothly estimate non-zero values of the coefficient function. The sparsity of the estimator is ensured by a \textit{functional LASSO penalty}, which pointwise shrinks toward zero the coefficient function, while the smoothness is provided by two roughness penalties that penalize the curvature of the final estimator. The resulting estimator is proved to be estimation and pointwise sign consistent. Via an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study, the estimation and predictive performance of the S-LASSO estimator are shown to be better than (or at worst comparable with) competing estimators already presented in the literature before. Practical advantages of the S-LASSO estimator are illustrated through the analysis of the \textit{Canadian weather}, \textit{Swedish mortality} and \textit{ship CO\textsubscript{2} emission data}. The S-LASSO method is implemented in the \textsf{R} package \textsf{slasso}, openly available online on CRAN., Comment: In press on Computational Statistics & Data Analysis