Generalized linear models for geometrical current predictors: An application to predict garment fit

Abstract

The aim of this article is to model an ordinal response variable in terms of vector-valued functional data included on a vector-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). In particular, we focus on the vector-valued RKHS obtained when a geometrical object (body) is characterized by a current and on the ordinal regression model. A common way to solve this problem in functional data analysis is to express the data in the orthonormal basis given by decomposition of the covariance operator. But our data present very important differences with respect to the usual functional data setting. On the one hand, they are vector-valued functions, and on the other, they are functions in an RKHS with a previously defined norm. We propose to use three different bases: the orthonormal basis given by the kernel that defines the RKHS, a basis obtained from decomposition of the integral operator defined using the covariance function and a third basis that combines the previous two. The three approaches are compared and applied to an interesting problem: building a model to predict the fit of children's garment sizes, based on a 3D database of the Spanish child population. Our proposal has been compared with alternative methods that explore the performance of other classifiers (Support Vector Machine and $k$ -NN), and with the result of applying the classification method proposed in this work, from different characterizations of the objects (landmarks and multivariate anthropometric measurements instead of currents), obtaining in all these cases worst results.