Online Updating Huber Robust Regression for Big Data Streams

Abstract: Big data streams are grasping increasing attention with the development of modern science and information technology. Due to the incompatibility of limited computer memory to high volume of streaming data, real-time methods without historical data storage is worth investigating. Moreover, outliers may occur with high velocity data streams generating, calling for more robust analysis. Motivated by these concerns, a novel Online Updating Huber Robust Regression algorithm is proposed in this paper. By extracting key features of new data subsets, it obtains a computational efficient online updating estimator without historical data storage. Meanwhile, by integrating Huber regression into the framework, the estimator is robust to contaminated data streams, such as heavy-tailed or heterogeneous distributed ones as well as cases with outliers. Moreover, the proposed online updating estimator is asymptotically equivalent to Oracle estimator obtained by the entire data and has a lower computation complexity. Extensive numerical simulations and a real data analysis are also conducted to evaluate the estimation and calculation efficiency of the proposed method.