This paper gives concise descriptions of a robust location statistic, the remedian of P. Rousseeuw and G. Bassett (1990) and a robust measure of dispersion, the "Sn" of P. Rousseeuw and C. Croux (1993). The use of Sn in least absolute errors regression (L1) is discussed, and BASIC programs for both statistics are provided. The remedian…

P. Rousseeuw and A. Leroy (1987) proposed a very robust alternative to classical estimates of mean vectors and covariance matrices, the Minimum Volume Ellipsoid (MVE). This paper describes the MVE technique and presents a BASIC program to implement it. The MVE is a "high breakdown" estimator, one that can cope with samples in which as…

A high-breakdown estimator is a robust statistic that can withstand a large amount of contaminated data. In linear regression, high-breakdown estimators can detect outliers and distinguish between good and bad leverage points. This paper summarizes the case for high-breakdown regression and emphasizes the least quartile difference estimator (LQD)…

Ordinary least-squares regression treats the variables asymmetrically, designating a dependent variable and one or more independent variables. When it is not obvious how to make this distinction, a researcher may prefer to use orthogonal regression, which treats the variables symmetrically. However, the usual procedure for orthogonal regression is…