Massively parallel nonparametric regression, with an application to developmental brain mapping

A penalized approach is proposed for performing large numbers of parallel nonparametric analyses of either of two types: Restricted likelihood ratio tests of a parametric regression model versus a general smooth alternative, and nonparametric regression. Compared with naïvely performing each analysis in turn, our techniques reduce computation time dramatically. Viewing the large collection of scatterplot smooths produced by our methods as functional data, we develop a clustering approach to summarize and visualize these results.Our approach is applicable to ultra-high-dimensional data, particularly data acquired by neuroimaging; we illustrate it with an analysis of developmental trajectories of functional connectivity at each of approximately 70,000 brain locations. Supplementary materials, including an appendix and an R package, are available online. © 2013 American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and Interface Foundation of North America.