S+Functional Data Analysis is the first commercial object oriented package for exploring, modeling, and analyzing functional data. Functional data analysis (FDA) handles longitudinal data and treats each observation as a function of time (or other variable). The functions are related. The goal is to analyze a sample of functions instead of a sample of related points.

FDA differs from traditional data analytic techniques in a number of ways. Functions can be evaluated at any point in their domain. Derivatives and integrals, which may provide better information (e.g. graphical) than...