Robust penalized least squares of depth trimmed residuals regression for high-dimensional data
This addresses robustness in high-dimensional regression for statistics and data science, though it is incremental as it builds on existing penalized regression frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of high-dimensional data with hidden outliers, revealing that most penalized regression methods break down with a single outlier, and proposes a robust method based on least squares of depth trimmed residuals that outperforms competitors in estimation and prediction accuracy in simulated and real data cases.
Challenges with data in the big-data era include (i) the dimension $p$ is often larger than the sample size $n$ (ii) outliers or contaminated points are frequently hidden and more difficult to detect. Challenge (i) renders most conventional methods inapplicable. Thus, it attracts tremendous attention from statistics, computer science, and bio-medical communities. Numerous penalized regression methods have been introduced as modern methods for analyzing high-dimensional data. Disproportionate attention has been paid to the challenge (ii) though. Penalized regression methods can do their job very well and are expected to handle the challenge (ii) simultaneously. Most of them, however, can break down by a single outlier (or single adversary contaminated point) as revealed in this article. The latter systematically examines leading penalized regression methods in the literature in terms of their robustness, provides quantitative assessment, and reveals that most of them can break down by a single outlier. Consequently, a novel robust penalized regression method based on the least sum of squares of depth trimmed residuals is proposed and studied carefully. Experiments with simulated and real data reveal that the newly proposed method can outperform some leading competitors in estimation and prediction accuracy in the cases considered.