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Functional data analysis covers a wide range of data types. They all have in common that the observed objects are functions of a univariate argument (e.g., time or wavelength) or a multivariate argument (say, a spatial position). These functions take on values which can in turn be univariate (such as the absorbance level) or multivariate (such as the red/green/blue color levels of an image). In practice it is important to be able to detect outliers in such data. For this purpose we introduce a new measure of outlyingness that we compute at each gridpoint of the functions’ domain. The proposed directional outlyingness (DO) measure accounts for skewness in the data and only requires computation time per direction. We derive the influence function of the DO and compute a cutoff for outlier detection. The resulting heatmap and functional outlier map reflect local and global outlyingness of a function. To illustrate the performance of the method on real data it is applied to spectra, MRI images, and video surveillance data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim is to construct a factor analysis method that can resist the effect of outliers. For this we start with a highly robust initial covariance estimator, after which the factors can be obtained from maximum likelihood or from principal factor analysis (PFA). We find that PFA based on the minimum covariance determinant scatter matrix works well. We also derive the influence function of the PFA method based on either the classical scatter matrix or a robust matrix. These results are applied to the construction of a new type of empirical influence function (EIF), which is very effective for detecting influential data. To facilitate the interpretation, we compute a cutoff value for this EIF. Our findings are illustrated with several real data examples. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]