Influence Functions for Dimension Reduction Methods: An Example Influence Study of Principal Hessian Direction Analysis

The first goal of this article is to consider influence analysis of principal Hessian directions (pHd) and highlight how such an analysis can provide valuable insight into its behaviour. Such insight includes reasons as to why pHd can sometimes return informative results when it is not expected to do so, and why many prefer a residuals-based pHd method over its response-based counterpart. The secondary goal of this article is to introduce a new influence measure applicable to many dimension reduction methods based on average squared canonical correlations. A general form of this measure is also given, allowing for application to dimension reduction methods other than pHd. A sample version of the measure is considered, with respect to pHd, with two example data sets. Copyright (c) 2009 Board of the Foundation of the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics.