Adaptive Functional Clustering with Structured Dependence via Variational Inference

Abstract

Functional clustering is an important tool for identifying latent heterogeneity in functional data and has been widely applied across various scientific fields. However, many existing methods are not fully adaptive, as they may require the number of clusters to be prespecified and may lack automatic control over the smoothness of the underlying functions. They also commonly assume independent and identically distributed errors, thereby overlooking additional within-curve dependence. We propose a fully adaptive Bayesian procedure for functional clustering that addresses these limitations through Dirichlet process priors, adaptive smoothness control, and flexible covariance modeling. For computational scalability, the proposed method employs variational inference as an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. Together, these features provide a unified Bayesian framework for functional clustering and cluster-specific mean function estimation in the presence of structured within-curve dependence.