Clustering of waveforms based on FPCA direction

Looking for curves similarity could be a complex issue characterized by subjective choices related to continuous transformations of observed discrete data (Chiodi, 1989). Waveforms correlation techniques have been introduced to charac- terize the degree of seismic event similarity (Menke, 1999) and in facilitating more accurate relative locations within similar event clusters by providing more precise timing of seismic wave (P and S) arrivals (Phillips, 1997). In this paper functional analysis (Ramsey, and Silverman, 2006) is considered to highlight common characteristics of waveforms-data and to summarize these charac- teristics by few components, by applying a variant of a classical clustering method to rotated data (Sangalli et al., 2010) according to the direction of maximum variance (i.e. based on PCA rotation of data).