A robust principal component analysis

Abstract

This work is concerned with robustness in Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The approach, which we adopt here, is to replace the criterion of least squares by another criterion based on a convex and sufficiently differentiable loss function ρ. Using this criterion we propose a robust estimate of the location vector and introduce an orthogonality with respect to (w.r.t.) ρ in order to define the different steps of a PCA. The influence functions of a vector mean and principal vectors are developed in order to provide method for obtaining a robust PCA. The practical procedure is based on an alternative-steps algorithm.