Using Clustering and Robust Estimators to Detect Outliers in Multivariate Data.

Outlier identification is important in many applications of multivariate analysis. Either because there is some specific interest in finding anomalous observations or as a pre-processing task before the application of some multivariate method, in order to preserve the results from possible harmful effects of those observations. It is also of great interest in discriminant analysis if, when predicting group membership, one wants to have the possibility of labelling an observation as ”does not belong to any of the available groups”. The identification of outliers in multivariate data is usually based on Mahalanobis distance. The use of robust estimates of the mean and the covariance matrix is advised in order to avoid the masking effect (Rousseeuw and von Zomeren, 1990; Rocke and Woodruff, 1996; Becker and Gather, 1999). However, the performance of these rules is still highly dependent of multivariate normality of the bulk of the data. The aim of the method here described is to remove this dependency. The first version of this method appeared in Santos-Pereira and Pires (2002). In this talk we discuss some refinements and also the relation with a recently proposed similar method (Hardin and Rocke, 2004).