This work focuses on the construction of functional representations in high-dimensional spaces.Attention is focused on the modeling of ignition phenomena using detailed kinetics, and on the ignition delay time as the primary quantity of interest (QoI). An iso-octane air mixture is first considered, using a detailed chemical mechanism with 3,811 elementary reactions. Uncertainty in all reaction rates is directly accounted for using associated uncertainty factors, assuming independent log-uniform priors. A Latin hypercube sample (LHS) of the ignition delay times was first generated, and the resulting database was then exploited to assess the possibility of constructing polynomial chaos (PC) representations in terms of the canonical random variables parametrizing the uncertain rates. We explored two avenues, namely sparse regression (SR) using LASSO, and a coordinate transform (CT) approach. Preconditioned variants of both approaches were also considered, namely using the logarithm of the ignition delay time as QoI. A global sensitivity analysis is performed using the representations constructed by SR and CT. Next, the tangent linear approximation is developed to estimate the sensitivity of the ignition delay time with respect to individual rate parameters in a detailed chemical mechanism. Attention is focused on a gas mixture reacting under adiabatic, constant-volume conditions. The approach is based on integrating the linearized system of equations governing the evolution of the partial derivatives of the state vector with respect to individual random variables, and a linearized approximation is developed to relate the ignition delay sensitivity to the scaled partial derivatives of temperature. In particular, the computations indicate that for detailed reaction mechanisms the TLA leads to robust local sensitivity predictions at a computational cost that is order-of-magnitude smaller than that incurred by finite-difference approaches based on one-at-a-time rate parameters perturbations. In the last part, we explore the potential of utilizing TLA-based sensitivities to identify active subspace and to construct suitable representations. Performance is assessed based contrasting experiences with CT-based machinery developed earlier.