ESSEC METALAB

RESEARCH

UNIVERSAL ROBUST REGRESSION VIA MAXIMUM MEAN DISCREPANCY

[ARTICLE] This study tackles data outliers in modern datasets by introducing a new method for robust estimation in various regression models. This method is adaptable and handles even manipulated data, making it suitable for real-world scenarios with diverse data quality.

by Pierre Alquier (ESSEC Business School), Mathieu Gerber

Many modern datasets are collected automatically and are thus easily contaminated by outliers. This has led to a renewed interest in robust estimation, including new notions of robustness such as robustness to adversarial contamination of the data. However, most robust estimation methods are designed for a specific model. Notably, many methods were proposed recently to obtain robust estimators in linear models, or generalized linear models, and a few were developed for very specific settings, for example beta regression or sample selection models. In this paper we develop a new approach for robust estimation in arbitrary regression models, based on maximum mean discrepancy minimization. We build two estimators that are both proven to be robust to Huber-type contamination. For one of them, we obtain a non-asymptotic error bound and show that it is also robust to adversarial contamination, but this estimator is computationally more expensive to use in practice than the other one. As a by-product of our theoretical analysis of the proposed estimators, we derive new results on kernel conditional mean embedding of distributions that are of independent interest.

[Please read the research paper here]

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