Chiara Brombin is Assistant Professor in Statistics at
the Faculty of Psychology (University Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano) and
national coordinator of the research project FIRB 2012 (RBFR12VHR7)
"Interpreting emotions: a computational tool integrating facial
expressions and biosignals based on shape analysis and Bayesian networks".
Her research interests focus on applied statistics and include nonparametric
permutation tests, statistical shape analysis, multivariate statistics, linear
mixed-effect models, joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data.

Luigi Salmaso is Full Professor of Statistics at the
Department of Management and Engineering at University of Padova. His research
interests include biostatistics, statistical methods for marketing research,
design of experiments, nonparametric statistics and agricultural statistics.
Specific topics of interests include permutation tests, resampling techniques
and ranking and selection methods.

Luigi Ippoliti is an Associate Professor in Statistics at
the University "G. d'Annunzio"of Chieti Pescara, Italy. His research
activity is mainly focused on the analysis of multivariate processes with
temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal structures with interests in economic,
environmental and Neuro-Physiological applications. 

Specific topics of interests include hierarchical
spatio-temporal models, image processing, functional data analysis and dynamic
shape analysis.

Lara Fontanella is a Researcher in Statistics at the
University G. d'Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. Her research interests focus
mainly on Latent Variable models and Statistical Analysis of Dynamic Shapes,
with applications to environmental, neuro-physiological, social and economic
data.

Caterina Fusilli holds a Bachelor's Degree in Statistics
and Information Technologies and a Master Degree in Statistics for Biomedicine,
Environment and Technology from the University "La Sapienza" of Rome. She also received the
Ph.D degree in Economics and Statistics from the University "G. d'Annunzio" of Chieti - Pescara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow
in the Bioinformatic unit at the IRCCS Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza - Mendel
Institute (Rome). Her research interests include the Next-Generation
Sequencing, Bioinformatics, Shape Analysis, Cluster Analysis and Finite Mixture
Models.                                                                                                                                          

This book considers specific inferential issues arising from the analysis of dynamic shapes with the attempt to solve the problems at hand using probability models and nonparametric tests. The models are simple to understand and interpret and provide a useful tool to describe the global dynamics of the landmark configurations. However, because of the non-Euclidean nature of shape spaces, distributions in shape spaces are not straightforward to obtain.

The book explores the use of the Gaussian distribution in the configuration space, with similarity transformations integrated out. Specifically, it works with the offset-normal shape distribution as a probability model for statistical inference on a sample of a temporal sequence of landmark configurations. This enables inference for Gaussian processes from configurations onto the shape space.

The book is divided in two parts, with the first three chapters covering material on the offset-normal shape distribution, and the remaining chapters covering the theory of NonParametric Combination (NPC) tests. The chapters offer a collection of applications which are bound together by the theme of this book.

They refer to the analysis of data from the FG-NET (Face and Gesture Recognition Research Network) database with facial expressions. For these data, it may be desirable to provide a description of the dynamics of the expressions, or testing whether there is a difference between the dynamics of two facial expressions or testing which of the landmarks are more informative in explaining the pattern of an expression.