Formulating robust linear regression estimation as a one-class LDA criterion: discriminative hat matrix.

Linear discriminant analysis, such as Fisher's criterion, is a statistical learning tool traditionally devoted to separating a training dataset into two or even several classes by the way of linear decision boundaries. In this paper, we show that this tool can formalize the robust linear regression problem as a robust estimator will do. More precisely, we develop a one-class Fischer's criterion in which the maximization provides both the regression parameters and the separation of the data in two classes: typical data and atypical data or outliers. This new criterion is built on the statistical properties of the subspace decomposition of the hat matrix. From this angle, we improve the discriminative properties of the hat matrix which is traditionally used as outlier diagnostic measure in linear regression. Naturally, we call this new approach discriminative hat matrix. The proposed algorithm is fully nonsupervised and needs only the initialization of one parameter. Synthetic and real datasets are used to study the performance both in terms of regression and classification of the proposed approach. We also illustrate its potential application to image recognition and fundamental matrix estimation in computer vision.