  Motivated by recent work studying massive imaging data in the neuroimaging
literature, we propose multivariate varying coefficient models (MVCM) for
modeling the relation between multiple functional responses and a set of
covariates. We develop several statistical inference procedures for MVCM and
systematically study their theoretical properties. We first establish the weak
convergence of the local linear estimate of coefficient functions, as well as
its asymptotic bias and variance, and then we derive asymptotic bias and mean
integrated squared error of smoothed individual functions and their uniform
convergence rate. We establish the uniform convergence rate of the estimated
covariance function of the individual functions and its associated eigenvalue
and eigenfunctions. We propose a global test for linear hypotheses of varying
coefficient functions, and derive its asymptotic distribution under the null
hypothesis. We also propose a simultaneous confidence band for each individual
effect curve. We conduct Monte Carlo simulation to examine the finite-sample
performance of the proposed procedures. We apply MVCM to investigate the
development of white matter diffusivities along the genu tract of the corpus
callosum in a clinical study of neurodevelopment.
