On Huber's contaminated model

Huber's contaminated model is a basic model for data with outliers. This paper aims at addressing several fundamental problems about this model. We first study its identifiability properties. Several theorems are presented to determine whether the model is identifiable for various situations. Based on these results, we discuss the problem of estimating the parameters with observations drawn from Huber's contaminated model. A definition of estimation consistency is introduced to handle the general case where the model may be unidentifiable. This consistency is a strong robustness property. After showing that existing estimators cannot be consistent in this sense, we propose a new estimator that possesses the consistency property under mild conditions. Its adaptive version, which can simultaneously possess this consistency property and optimal asymptotic efficiency, is also provided. Numerical examples show that our estimators have better overall performance than existing estimators no matter how many outliers in the data.