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A reweighting approach to robust clustering

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Abstract

An iteratively reweighted approach for robust clustering is presented in this work. The method is initialized with a very robust clustering partition based on an high trimming level. The initial partition is then refined to reduce the number of wrongly discarded observations and substantially increase efficiency. Simulation studies and real data examples indicate that the final clustering solution has both good properties in terms of robustness and efficiency and naturally adapts to the true underlying contamination level.

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Acknowledgements

The research was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad y fondos FEDER, Grant MTM2014-56235-C2-1-P, and by Consejería de Educación de la Junta de Castilla y León, Grant VA212U13. We are grateful to Gallup, Inc. and the Voices of the Hungry project, FAO, for access to the GWP/FIES data. We also would like to thank the AE and two referees for kind comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Francesco Dotto

  2. Dipartimento di Sanità Pubblica e Malattie Infettive, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Alessio Farcomeni

  3. Departamento de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, Universidad de Valladolid, Paseo de Belén, 7, 47011, Valladolid, Spain

    Luis Angel García-Escudero

  4. Departamento de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, Universidad de Valladolid, Calle Ramón y Cajal, 7, 47005, Valladolid, Spain

    Agustín Mayo-Iscar

Authors
  1. Francesco Dotto
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  2. Alessio Farcomeni
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  3. Luis Angel García-Escudero
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  4. Agustín Mayo-Iscar
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Correspondence to Alessio Farcomeni.

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Dotto, F., Farcomeni, A., García-Escudero, L.A. et al. A reweighting approach to robust clustering. Stat Comput 28, 477–493 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-017-9742-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11222-017-9742-x

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