Paper detail

Improved performance guarantees for Tukey's median

Is there a natural way to order data in dimension greater than one? The approach based on the notion of data depth, often associated with John Tukey, is among the most popular. Tukey's depth has found applications in robust statistics, graph theory, and the study of elections and social choice. We present improved performance guarantees for empirical Tukey's median, a deepest point associated with a given sample, when the data-generating distribution is elliptically symmetric and possibly anisotropic. Some of our results remain valid in the wider class of affine equivariant estimators. As a corollary of our bounds, we show that the typical diameter of the set of all empirical Tukey's medians scales like $o(n^{-1/2})$ where $n$ is the sample size. Moreover, when the data follow the bivariate normal distribution, we prove that with high probability, the diameter is of order $O(n^{-3/4}\log^{1/2}(n))$. On the technical side, we show how affine equivariance can be leveraged to improve concentration bounds; moreover, we develop sharp strong approximation results for empirical processes indexed by halfspaces that could be of independent interest.