MCD-RoSIS – A robust procedure for variable selection

Abstract

Consider the task of estimating a regression function for describing the relationship between a response and a vector of p predictors. Often only a small subset of all given candidate predictors actually effects the response, while the rest might inhibit the analysis. Procedures for variable selection aim to identify the true predictors. A method for variable selection when the dimension p of the regressor space is much larger than the sample size n is Sure Independence Screening (SIS). The number of predictors is to be reduced to a value less than the number of observations before conducting the regression analysis. As SIS is based on nonrobust estimators, outliers in the data might lead to the elimination of true predictors. Hence, a robustified version of SIS called RoSIS was proposed which is based on robust estimators. Here, we give a modification of RoSIS by using the MCD estimator in the new algorithm. The new procedure MCD-RoSIS leads to better results, especially under collinearity. In a simulation study we compare the performance of SIS, RoSIS and MCD-RoSIS w.r.t. their robustness against different types of data contamination as well as different degrees of collinearity.