69 research outputs found
Yet another breakdown point notion: EFSBP - illustrated at scale-shape models
The breakdown point in its different variants is one of the central notions
to quantify the global robustness of a procedure. We propose a simple
supplementary variant which is useful in situations where we have no obvious or
only partial equivariance: Extending the Donoho and Huber(1983) Finite Sample
Breakdown Point, we propose the Expected Finite Sample Breakdown Point to
produce less configuration-dependent values while still preserving the finite
sample aspect of the former definition. We apply this notion for joint
estimation of scale and shape (with only scale-equivariance available),
exemplified for generalized Pareto, generalized extreme value, Weibull, and
Gamma distributions. In these settings, we are interested in highly-robust,
easy-to-compute initial estimators; to this end we study Pickands-type and
Location-Dispersion-type estimators and compute their respective breakdown
points.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure
Infinitesimally Robust Estimation in General Smoothly Parametrized Models
We describe the shrinking neighborhood approach of Robust Statistics, which
applies to general smoothly parametrized models, especially, exponential
families. Equal generality is achieved by object oriented implementation of the
optimally robust estimators. We evaluate the estimates on real datasets from
literature by means of our R packages ROptEst and RobLox
Probing Real Sensory Worlds of Receivers with Unsupervised Clustering
The task of an organism to extract information about the external environment from sensory signals is based entirely on the analysis of ongoing afferent spike activity provided by the sense organs. We investigate the processing of auditory stimuli by an acoustic interneuron of insects. In contrast to most previous work we do this by using stimuli and neurophysiological recordings directly in the nocturnal tropical rainforest, where the insect communicates. Different from typical recordings in sound proof laboratories, strong environmental noise from multiple sound sources interferes with the perception of acoustic signals in these realistic scenarios. We apply a recently developed unsupervised machine learning algorithm based on probabilistic inference to find frequently occurring firing patterns in the response of the acoustic interneuron. We can thus ask how much information the central nervous system of the receiver can extract from bursts without ever being told which type and which variants of bursts are characteristic for particular stimuli. Our results show that the reliability of burst coding in the time domain is so high that identical stimuli lead to extremely similar spike pattern responses, even for different preparations on different dates, and even if one of the preparations is recorded outdoors and the other one in the sound proof lab. Simultaneous recordings in two preparations exposed to the same acoustic environment reveal that characteristics of burst patterns are largely preserved among individuals of the same species. Our study shows that burst coding can provide a reliable mechanism for acoustic insects to classify and discriminate signals under very noisy real-world conditions. This gives new insights into the neural mechanisms potentially used by bushcrickets to discriminate conspecific songs from sounds of predators in similar carrier frequency bands
Heterogeneous areasâidentification of outliers and calculation of soil sampling uncertainty using the modified RANOVA method
Computing of high breakdown regression estimators without sorting on graphics processing units
We present an approach to computing high-breakdown regression estimators in parallel on graphics processing units (GPU).We show that sorting the residuals is not necessary, and it can be substituted by calculating the median. We present and compare various methods to calculate the median and order statistics on GPUs. We introduce an alternative method based on the optimization of a convex function, and showits numerical superiority when calculating the order statistics of very large arrays on GPUs. <br /
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