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(To appear in The American Statistician.) Distance covariance (Sz\'ekely, Rizzo, and Bakirov, 2007) is a fascinating recent notion, which is popular as a test for dependence of any type between random variables $X$ and $Y$. This approach deserves to be touched upon in modern courses on mathematical statistics. It makes use of distances of the type $|X-X'|$ and $|Y-Y'|$, where $(X',Y')$ is an independent copy of $(X,Y)$. This raises natural questions about independence of variables like $X-X'$ and $Y-Y'$, about the connection between Cov$(|X-X'|,|Y-Y'|)$ and the covariance between doubly centered distances, and about necessary and sufficient conditions for independence. We show some basic results and present a new and nontechnical counterexample to a common fallacy, which provides more insight. We also show some motivating examples involving bivariate distributions and contingency tables, which can be used as didactic material for introducing distance correlation.

Multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (MSSA) is a powerful and widely used nonparametric method for multivariate time series, which allows the analysis of complex temporal data from diverse fields such as finance, healthcare, ecology, and engineering. However, MSSA lacks robustness against outliers because it relies on the singular value decomposition, which is very sensitive to the presence of anomalous values. MSSA can then give biased results and lead to erroneous conclusions. In this paper a new MSSA method is proposed, named RObust Diagonalwise Estimation of SSA (RODESSA), which is robust against the presence of cellwise and casewise outliers. In particular, the decomposition step of MSSA is replaced by a new robust low-rank approximation of the trajectory matrix that takes its special structure into account. A fast algorithm is constructed, and it is proved that each iteration step decreases the objective function. In order to visualize different types of outliers, a new graphical display is introduced, called an enhanced time series plot. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is performed to compare RODESSA with competing approaches in the literature. A real data example about temperature analysis in passenger railway vehicles demonstrates the practical utility of the proposed approach.

Linear model trees are regression trees that incorporate linear models in the leaf nodes. This preserves the intuitive interpretation of decision trees and at the same time enables them to better capture linear relationships, which is hard for standard decision trees. But most existing methods for fitting linear model trees are time consuming and therefore not scalable to large data sets. In addition, they are more prone to overfitting and extrapolation issues than standard regression trees. In this paper we introduce PILOT, a new algorithm for linear model trees that is fast, regularized, stable and interpretable. PILOT trains in a greedy fashion like classic regression trees, but incorporates an $L^2$ boosting approach and a model selection rule for fitting linear models in the nodes. The abbreviation PILOT stands for $PI$ecewise $L$inear $O$rganic $T$ree, where `organic' refers to the fact that no pruning is carried out. PILOT has the same low time and space complexity as CART without its pruning. An empirical study indicates that PILOT tends to outperform standard decision trees and other linear model trees on a variety of data sets. Moreover, we prove its consistency in an additive model setting under weak assumptions. When the data is generated by a linear model, the convergence rate is polynomial.

The usual Minimum Covariance Determinant (MCD) estimator of a covariance matrix is robust against casewise outliers. These are cases (that is, rows of the data matrix) that behave differently from the majority of cases, raising suspicion that they might belong to a different population. On the other hand, cellwise outliers are individual cells in the data matrix. When a row contains one or more outlying cells, the other cells in the same row still contain useful information that we wish to preserve. We propose a cellwise robust version of the MCD method, called cellMCD. Its main building blocks are observed likelihood and a penalty term on the number of flagged cellwise outliers. It possesses good breakdown properties. We construct a fast algorithm for cellMCD based on concentration steps (C-steps) that always lower the objective. The method performs well in simulations with cellwise outliers, and has high finite-sample efficiency on clean data. It is illustrated on real data with visualizations of the results.

Classification by neural nets and by tree-based methods are powerful tools of machine learning. There exist interesting visualizations of the inner workings of these and other classifiers. Here we pursue a different goal, which is to visualize the cases being classified, either in training data or in test data. An important aspect is whether a case has been classified to its given class (label) or whether the classifier wants to assign it to different class. This is reflected in the (conditional and posterior) probability of the alternative class (PAC). A high PAC indicates label bias, i.e. the possibility that the case was mislabeled. The PAC is used to construct a silhouette plot which is similar in spirit to the silhouette plot for cluster analysis (Rousseeuw, 1987). The average silhouette width can be used to compare different classifications of the same dataset. We will also draw quasi residual plots of the PAC versus a data feature, which may lead to more insight in the data. One of these data features is how far each case lies from its given class. The graphical displays are illustrated and interpreted on benchmark data sets containing images, mixed features, and tweets.

Many real data sets contain numerical features (variables) whose distribution is far from normal (gaussian). Instead, their distribution is often skewed. In order to handle such data it is customary to preprocess the variables to make them more normal. The Box-Cox and Yeo-Johnson transformations are well-known tools for this. However, the standard maximum likelihood estimator of their transformation parameter is highly sensitive to outliers, and will often try to move outliers inward at the expense of the normality of the central part of the data. We propose a modification of these transformations as well as an estimator of the transformation parameter that is robust to outliers, so the transformed data can be approximately normal in the center and a few outliers may deviate from it. It compares favorably to existing techniques in an extensive simulation study and on real data.