Conditional selective inference for robust regression and outlier detection using piecewise-linear homotopy continuation

Abstract

In this paper, we consider conditional selective inference (SI) for a linear model estimated after outliers are removed from the data. To apply the conditional SI framework, it is necessary to characterize the events of how the robust method identifies outliers. Unfortunately, the existing conditional SIs cannot be directly applied to our problem because they are applicable to the case where the selection events can be represented by linear or quadratic constraints. We propose a conditional SI method for popular robust regressions such as least-absolute-deviation regression and Huber regression by introducing a new computational method using a convex optimization technique called homotopy method. We show that the proposed conditional SI method is applicable to a wide class of robust regression and outlier detection methods and has good empirical performance on both synthetic data and real data experiments.