Papers › Robust Estimation and Inference for Categorical Data
Robust Estimation and Inference for Categorical Data
Max Welz
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
While there is a rich literature on robust methodologies for contamination in continuously distributed data, contamination in categorical data is largely overlooked. This is regrettable because many datasets are categorical and oftentimes suffer from contamination. Examples include inattentive responding and bot responses in questionnaires or zero-inflated count data. We propose a novel class of contamination-robust estimators of models for categorical data, coined C-estimators (``C'' for categorical). We show that the countable and possibly finite sample space of categorical data results in non-standard theoretical properties. Notably, in contrast to classic robustness theory, C-estimators can be simultaneously robust \textit{and} fully efficient at the postulated model. In addition, a certain particularly robust specification fails to be asymptotically Gaussian at the postulated model, but is asymptotically Gaussian in the presence of contamination. We furthermore propose a diagnostic test to identify categorical outliers and demonstrate the enhanced robustness of C-estimators in a simulation study.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections