Robust Methods for Data Reduction gives a non-technical overview of robust data reduction techniques, encouraging the use of these important and useful methods in practical applications. The main areas covered include principal components analysis, sparse principal component analysis, canonical correlation analysis, factor analysis, clustering, dou

Robust Statistics provides a fresh approach to the difficult problem of editing in data reduction. Of prime concern are grossly erroneous measurements which, when undetected, completely destroy automated data reduction procedures causing costly reruns and time delays with human detection of the erroneous measurements. The application of robust statistical methods has been highly successful in dealing with this problem. An introduction to the robust M-estimates and their numerical computation is given. The application of M-estimates to data preprocessing, instrument calibration, N-station cinetheodolites, N-station radar solution, and filtering are described in detail. Numerical examples of these applications using real measurements are given. (Author).

The field of mathematical statistics called robustness statistics deals with the stability of statistical inference under variations of accepted distribution models. Although robust statistics involves mathematically highly defined tools, robust methods exhibit a satisfactory behaviour in small samples, thus being quite useful in applications. This volume in the book series Modern Probability and Statistics addresses various topics in the field of robust statistics and data analysis, such as: a probability-free approach in data analysis; minimax variance estimators of location, scale, regression, autoregression and correlation; "L1-norm methods; adaptive, data reduction, bivariate boxplot, and multivariate outlier detection algorithms; applications in reliability, detection of signals, and analysis of the sudden cardiac death risk factors. The book contains new results related to robustness and data analysis technologies, including both theoretical aspects and practical needs of data processing, which have been relatively inaccessible as they were originally only published in Russian. This book will be of value and interest to researchers in mathematical statistics as well as to those using statistical methods.

This proceedings volume is a collection of peer reviewed papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Soft Methods in Probability and Statistics (SMPS 2016) held in Rome (Italy). The book is dedicated to Data science which aims at developing automated methods to analyze massive amounts of data and to extract knowledge from them. It shows how Data science employs various programming techniques and methods of data wrangling, data visualization, machine learning, probability and statistics. The soft methods proposed in this volume represent a collection of tools in these fields that can also be useful for data science.

This text presents methods that are robust to the assumption of a multivariate normal distribution or methods that are robust to certain types of outliers. Instead of using exact theory based on the multivariate normal distribution, the simpler and more applicable large sample theory is given. The text develops among the first practical robust regression and robust multivariate location and dispersion estimators backed by theory. The robust techniques are illustrated for methods such as principal component analysis, canonical correlation analysis, and factor analysis. A simple way to bootstrap confidence regions is also provided. Much of the research on robust multivariate analysis in this book is being published for the first time. The text is suitable for a first course in Multivariate Statistical Analysis or a first course in Robust Statistics. This graduate text is also useful for people who are familiar with the traditional multivariate topics, but want to know more about handling data sets with outliers. Many R programs and R data sets are available on the author’s website.

Dimensionality reduction is widely used in many statistical applications, such as image analysis, microarray analysis, or text mining. This thesis focuses on three problems that relate to the robustness in dimension reduction. The first topic is the performance analysis in dimension reduction, that is, quantitatively assessing the performance of a algorithm on a given dataset. A criterion for success is established from the geometric point of view to address this issues. A family of goodness measures, called \textsl{local rank correlation}, is developed to assess the performance of dimensionality reduction methods. The potential application of the local rank correlation in selecting tuning parameters of dimension reduction algorithms is also explored. The second topic is the sensitivity analysis in dimension reduction. Two types of influence functions are developed as measures of robustness, based on which we develop graphical display strategies for visualizing the robustness of a dimension reduction method, and flagging potential outliers. In the third part of the thesis, a novel robust PCA framework, called \textsl{Performance-Weighted Bagging PCA}, is proposed from the perspective of model averaging. It obtains a robust linear subspace by weighted averaging a collection of subspaces produced by subsamples. The robustness against outliers is achieved by a proper weighting scheme, and possible choices of weighting scheme are investigated.

This book brings together selected peer-reviewed contributions from various research fields in statistics, and highlights the diverse approaches and analyses related to real-life phenomena. Major topics covered in this volume include, but are not limited to, bayesian inference, likelihood approach, pseudo-likelihoods, regression, time series, and data analysis as well as applications in the life and social sciences. The software packages used in the papers are made available by the authors. This book is a result of the 47th Scientific Meeting of the Italian Statistical Society, held at the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2014.