Laboratory scientists are well equipped with statistical tools for univariate data, yet many phenomena of scientific interest are time-variant or otherwise multidimensional. Functional data analysis is one way of approaching such data: by representing these more complex data as single data points in a mathematical space of functions. The mathematical concept of functional depth provides a notion of centrality which allows for descriptive statistics and some comparative statistics on these data. Here, we present statdepth, a Python package for functional depth-based analyses which naturally extends familiar single-data-point L-statistics and related methods to time-variant data trajectories or multidimensional data.

翻译：实验科学工作者已拥有完善的单变量数据统计工具，然而诸多具有科学意义的现象往往呈现时变性或多维性特征。函数型数据分析为此类数据处理提供了有效途径：通过将复杂数据表征为数学函数空间中的独立数据点。函数深度这一数学概念定义了中心性度量，使得这类数据的描述性统计与部分比较性统计成为可能。本文介绍statdepth——一个基于函数深度的Python分析软件包，该工具将经典单数据点L统计量及相关方法自然地扩展到时变数据轨迹或多维数据分析中。