Robust concentration graph model selection

Abstract

Concentration graph models are an attractive tool to explore the conditional independence structure in a multivariate normal distribution. In applications, in absence of a priori knowledge, it is possible to select the graph underlying a set of data through an appropriate model selection procedure. The recently proposed procedure, SINful, is appealing but sensitive to outliers, as it utilizes the sample estimator of the covariance matrix. A method to make the SINful procedure robust with respect to the presence of outlying observations, is proposed. This is based on the minimum covariance determinant (MCD) estimator for the variance–covariance matrix. A simulation study shows the advantages of this method.