Minimum regularized covariance determinant and principal component analysis-based method for the identification of high leverage points in high dimensional sparse data.

The main aim of this paper is to propose a novel method (RMD-MRCD-PCA) of identification of High Leverage Points (HLPs) in high-dimensional sparse data. It is to address the weakness of the Robust Mahalanobis Distance (RMD) method which is based on the Minimum Regularized Covariance Determinant (RMD-MRCD), which indicates a decrease in its performance as the number of independent variables () increases. The RMD-MRCD-PCA is developed by incorporating the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in the MRCD algorithm whereby this robust approach shrinks the covariance matrix to make it invertible and thus, can be employed to compute the RMD for high dimensional data.