Robust Estimators are Hard to Compute

In modern statistics, the robust estimation of parameters of a regression hyperplane is a central problem. Robustness means that the estimation is not or only slightly affected by outliers in the data. In this paper, it is shown that the following robust estimators are hard to compute: LMS, LQS, LTS, LTA, MCD, MVE, Constrained M estimator, Projection Depth (PD) and Stahel-Donoho. In addition, a data set is presented such that the ltsReg-procedure of R has probability less than 0.0001 of finding a correct answer. Furthermore, it is described, how to design new robust estimators.