🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the lack of a unified formulation for scalar, multivariate, and functional regression models, which obscures their intrinsic connections. By leveraging an integral operator defined with respect to general measures, the authors propose a unified framework that subsumes all three regression types as special cases of the same operator under different input and output measures. This framework reveals classical regression forms as measure-dependent manifestations of a single operator, clarifies discretized modeling as operator estimation under specific measures, and explains the efficacy of vectorized multivariate regression in linear settings. Theoretically, the authors prove that discrete representations correspond exactly to operator evaluations under discrete measures and converge to the continuous case as the discretization grid refines; moreover, this estimator is equivalent to standard multivariate regression and inherits its classical statistical properties.
📝 Abstract
We develop a unified operator framework for scalar, multivariate, and functional regression based on integral operators defined with respect to general measures. Within this framework, classical regression models, including scalar-on-function, function-on-scalar, function-on-function, and multivariate multiple regression, arise as special cases corresponding to different choices of input and output measures. We establish three main results. First, we show that the standard regression taxonomy can be expressed as a single operator under varying measures. Second, we demonstrate that discrete representations correspond to exact operator evaluations under discrete measures and converge to the continuous operator as the observation grid is refined. Third, we show that estimation under the discrete-measure formulation reduces to standard multivariate regression, with statistical properties governed by classical results. A simulation study illustrates these principles, highlighting the roles of discretization, conditioning, and estimation. Overall, the proposed framework clarifies the relationship between functional and multivariate regression and provides a meaningful interpretation of discretized modeling approaches as operator estimation under different measure specifications. This perspective also explains why vectorized multivariate regression is often competitive with functional methods in linear settings: it directly estimates the discrete-measure representation of the underlying operator.