A New Efficient Redescending M-Estimator for Robust Fitting of Linear Regression Models in the Presence of Outliers

Abstract

Robust regression is an important iterative procedure that seeks analyzing data sets that are contaminated with outliers and unusual observations and reducing their impact over regression coefficients. Robust estimation methods have been introduced to deal with the problem of outliers and provide efficient and stable estimates in their presence. Various robust estimators have been developed in the literature to restrict the unbounded influence of the outliers or leverage points on the model estimates. Here, a new redescending M-estimator is proposed using a novel objective function with the prime focus on getting highly robust and efficient estimates that give promising results. It is evident from the results that, for normal and clean data, the proposed estimator is almost as efficient as ordinary least square method and, however, becomes highly resistant to outliers when it is used for contaminated datasets. The simulation study is being carried out to assess the performance of the proposed redescending M-estimator over different data generation scenarios including normal, t-distribution, and double exponential distributions with different levels of outliers’ contamination, and the results are compared with the existing redescending M-estimators, e.g., Huber, Tukey Biweight, Hampel, and Andrew-Sign function. The performance of the proposed estimators was also checked using real-life data applications of the estimators and found that the proposed estimators give promising results as compared to the existing estimators.