Home Page

Papers

Submissions

News

Editorial Board

Special Issues

Open Source Software

Proceedings (PMLR)

Data (DMLR)

Transactions (TMLR)

Search

Statistics

Login

Frequently Asked Questions

Contact Us



RSS Feed

Robust Kernel Density Estimation

JooSeuk Kim, Clayton D. Scott; 13(82):2529−2565, 2012.

Abstract

We propose a method for nonparametric density estimation that exhibits robustness to contamination of the training sample. This method achieves robustness by combining a traditional kernel density estimator (KDE) with ideas from classical M-estimation. We interpret the KDE based on a positive semi-definite kernel as a sample mean in the associated reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Since the sample mean is sensitive to outliers, we estimate it robustly via M-estimation, yielding a robust kernel density estimator (RKDE).
An RKDE can be computed efficiently via a kernelized iteratively re-weighted least squares (IRWLS) algorithm. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for kernelized IRWLS to converge to the global minimizer of the M-estimator objective function. The robustness of the RKDE is demonstrated with a representer theorem, the influence function, and experimental results for density estimation and anomaly detection.

[abs][pdf][bib]       
© JMLR 2012. (edit, beta)

Mastodon