Title
M-estimation with incomplete and dependent multivariate data
Abstract
We extend the theory of M-estimation to incomplete and dependent multivariate data. ML-estimation can still be considered a special case of M-estimation in this context. We notice that the unobserved data must be missing completely at random but not only missing at random, which is a typical assumption of ML-estimation, to guarantee the consistency of an M-estimator. Further, we show that the weight functions for scatter must satisfy a critical scaling condition, which is implicitly fulfilled both by the Gaussian and by Tyler’s weight function. We generalize this principal result by introducing the class of power weight functions, which contains the two aforementioned weight functions as limiting cases. A simulation study confirms our theoretical findings. If the data are heavy tailed or contaminated, the M-estimators turn out to be favorable compared to the ML-estimators that are based on the normal-distribution assumption.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.jmva.2019.104569
Journal of Multivariate Analysis
Keywords
Field
DocType
62H12
Weight function,Multivariate statistics,Gaussian,Notice,Missing data,Statistics,Scaling,Limiting,Mathematics,Special case
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
176
0047-259X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Gabriel Frahm100.34
Klaus Nordhausen29014.33
Hannu Oja38813.07