Bayesian adaptive and interpretable functional regression for exposure profiles

Pollutant exposures during gestation are a known and adverse factor for birth and health outcomes. However, the links between prenatal air pollution exposures and educational outcomes are less clear, in particular the critical windows of susceptibility during pregnancy. Using a large cohort of students in North Carolina, we study prenatal $\mbox{PM}_{2.5}$ exposures recorded at near-continuous resolutions and linked to 4th end-of-grade reading scores. We develop a locally-adaptive Bayesian regression model for scalar responses with functional and scalar predictors. The proposed model pairs a B-spline basis expansion with dynamic shrinkage priors to capture both smooth and rapidly-changing features in the regression surface. The local adaptivity is manifested in more accurate point estimates and more precise uncertainty quantification than existing methods on simulated data. The model is accompanied by a highly scalable Gibbs sampler for fully Bayesian inference on large datasets. In addition, we describe broad limitations with the interpretability of scalar-on-function regression models, and introduce new decision analysis tools to guide the model interpretation. Using these methods, we identify a period within the third trimester as the critical window of susceptibility to $\mbox{PM}_{2.5}$ exposure.