History and Unpopularity of Robust Regression
Despite their superior performance over least squares estimation in many situations, robust methods for regression are still not widely used. Several reasons may help explain their unpopularity (Hampel et al. 1986, 2005). One possible reason is that there are several competing methods and the field got off to many false starts. Also, computation of robust estimates is much more computationally intensive than least squares estimation; in recent years however, this objection has become less relevant as computing power has increased greatly. Another reason may be that some popular statistical software packages failed to implement the methods (Stromberg, 2004). The belief of many statisticians that classical methods are robust may be another reason.
Although uptake of robust methods has been slow, modern mainstream statistics text books often include discussion of these methods (for example, the books by Seber and Lee, and by Faraway; for a good general description of how the various robust regression methods developed from one another see Andersen's book). Also, modern statistical software packages such as R, Stata and S-PLUS include considerable functionality for robust estimation (see, for example, the books by Venables and Ripley, and by Maronna et al.).
Read more about this topic: Robust Regression
Famous quotes containing the words history and, history and/or robust:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At ... moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.”
—Alice James (1848–1892)