Some Robust Distances for Multivariate Data

Numerous methods of multivariate statistics and data mining suffer from the presence of outlying measurements in the data. This paper presents new distance measures suitable for continuous data. First, we consider a Mahalanobis distance suitable for high-dimensional data with the number of variables (largely) exceeding the number of observations. We propose its doubly regularized version, which combines a regularization of the covariance matrix with replacing the means of multivariate data by their regularized counterparts. We formulate explicit expressions for some versions of the regularization of the means, which can be interpreted as a denoising (i.e. robust version) of standard means. Further, we propose a robust cosine similarity measure, which is based on implicit weighting of individual observations. We derive properties of the newly proposed robust cosine similarity, which includes a proof of the high robustness in terms of the breakdown point