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RE: RE: st: Elimination of outliers
From
Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To
[email protected], <[email protected]>
Subject
RE: RE: st: Elimination of outliers
Date
Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:23:14 -0500
At 10:42 AM 6/6/2011, Jeff wrote:
"Outliers and influential observations should not routinely be deleted
or automatically down-weighted because they are not necessarily bad
observations. On the contrary, if they are correct, they may be the
most informative points in the data. For example, they may indicate
that the data did not come from a normal population or that the model is
not linear." "Regression Analysis By Example", 3rd Edition, Chatterjee,
Hadi, Price.
Jeffrey B. Wolpin
In general, I think you should look at outliers before automatically
eliminating them. It might be (a) they are coding errors, which you
can either fix or use as a justification for dropping the case (b)
they may lead you to redefine the population of interest, e.g. maybe
you find your model works well for one group but a different model is
required for another (c) you may be able to identify relevant
variables that should be added to the model, and the cases won't be
outliers anymore.
Also, there are different kinds of outliers. A univariate outlier
might have an atypically high value on Y. But, it might also have an
atypically high value on X, so it won't be an outlier on the
regression line. It sounded to me like the original poster wanted to
drop univariate outliers.
I don't remember the exact details, but there is some planet whose
orbit did not quite fit the theories of the day. Somebody said that,
if social scientists were doing things, they would have dropped that
planet as an outlier and we never would have discovered the theory of
relativity. :)
-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME: (574)289-5227
EMAIL: [email protected]
WWW: http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam
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