  Functional data analysis on nonlinear manifolds has drawn recent interest.
Sphere-valued functional data, which are encountered for example as movement
trajectories on the surface of the earth, are an important special case. We
consider an intrinsic principal component analysis for smooth Riemannian
manifold-valued functional data and study its asymptotic properties. Riemannian
functional principal component analysis (RFPCA) is carried out by first mapping
the manifold-valued data through Riemannian logarithm maps to tangent spaces
around the time-varying Fr\'echet mean function, and then performing a
classical multivariate functional principal component analysis on the linear
tangent spaces. Representations of the Riemannian manifold-valued functions and
the eigenfunctions on the original manifold are then obtained with exponential
maps. The tangent-space approximation through functional principal component
analysis is shown to be well-behaved in terms of controlling the residual
variation if the Riemannian manifold has nonnegative curvature. Specifically,
we derive a central limit theorem for the mean function, as well as root-$n$
uniform convergence rates for other model components, including the covariance
function, eigenfunctions, and functional principal component scores. Our
applications include a novel framework for the analysis of longitudinal
compositional data, achieved by mapping longitudinal compositional data to
trajectories on the sphere, illustrated with longitudinal fruit fly behavior
patterns. RFPCA is shown to be superior in terms of trajectory recovery in
comparison to an unrestricted functional principal component analysis in
applications and simulations and is also found to produce principal component
scores that are better predictors for classification compared to traditional
functional functional principal component scores.
