I've blogged several times about multivariate normality, including how to generate random values from a multivariate normal distribution. But given a set of multivariate data, how can you determine if it is likely to have come from a multivariate normal distribution? The answer, of course, is to run a goodness-of-fit
I previously described how to use Mahalanobis distance to find outliers in multivariate data. This article takes a closer look at Mahalanobis distance. A subsequent article will describe how you can compute Mahalanobis distance. Distance in standard units In statistics, we sometimes measure "nearness" or "farness" in terms of the
In two previous blog posts I worked through examples in the survey article, "Robust statistics for outlier detection," by Peter Rousseeuw and Mia Hubert. Robust estimates of location in a univariate setting are well-known, with the median statistic being the classical example. Robust estimates of scale are less well-known, with
