Interactions and outliers in the two-way analysis of variance

Abstract

The two-way analysis of variance with interactions is a well established and integral part of statistics. In spite of its long standing, it is shown that the standard definition of interactions is counterintuitive and obfuscates rather than clarifies. A different definition of interaction is given which among other advantages allows the detection of interactions even in the case of one observation per cell. A characterization of unconditionally identifiable interaction patterns is given and it is proved that such patterns can be identified by the $L^1$ functional. The unconditionally identifiable interaction patterns describe the optimal breakdown behavior of any equivariant location functional from which it follows that the $L^1$ functional has optimal breakdown behavior. Possible lack of uniqueness of the $L^1$ functional can be overcome using an $M$ functional with an external scale derived independently from the observations. The resulting procedures are applied to some data sets including one describing the results of an interlaboratory test.