Robust Statistics

Book excerpt: The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selectedbooks that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effortto increase global appeal and general circulation. With these newunabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives ofthese works by making them available to future generations ofstatisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "This is a nice book containing a wealth of information, much ofit due to the authors. . . . If an instructor designing such acourse wanted a textbook, this book would be the best choiceavailable. . . . There are many stimulating exercises, and the bookalso contains an excellent index and an extensive list ofreferences." —Technometrics "[This] book should be read carefully by anyone who isinterested in dealing with statistical models in a realisticfashion." —American Scientist Introducing concepts, theory, and applications, RobustStatistics is accessible to a broad audience, avoidingallusions to high-powered mathematics while emphasizing ideas,heuristics, and background. The text covers the approach based onthe influence function (the effect of an outlier on an estimater,for example) and related notions such as the breakdown point. Italso treats the change-of-variance function, fundamental conceptsand results in the framework of estimation of a single parameter,and applications to estimation of covariance matrices andregression parameters.