A similarity analysis of curves

The authors propose a method for comparing two samples of curves. The notion of similarity between two curves is the basis of three statistics they suggest for testing the null hypothesis of no difference between the two groups. They exploit standard tools from functional data analysis to preprocess the observed curves and use the permutation distribution under the null hypothesis to obtain p‐values for their tests. They explore the operating characteristics of these tests through simulations and as an application, compare the ganglioside distribution in brain tissue between old and young rats.