Curve registration by nonparametric goodness-of-fit testing

The problem of curve registration appears in many different areas of applications ranging from neuroscience to road traffic modeling. In the present work,¹1This paper was presented in part at the AI-STATS 2012 conference. we propose a nonparametric testing framework in which we develop a generalized likelihood ratio test to perform curve registration. We first prove that, under the null hypothesis, the resulting test statistic is asymptotically distributed as a chi-squared random variable. This result, often referred to as Wilks' phenomenon, provides a natural threshold for the test of a prescribed asymptotic significance level and a natural measure of lack-of-fit in terms of the p-value of the χ²-test. We also prove that the proposed test is consistent, i.e., its power is asymptotically equal to 1. Finite sample properties of the proposed methodology are demonstrated by numerical simulations. As an application, a new local descriptor for digital images is introduced and an experimental evaluation of its discriminative power is conducted.