Distance-based directional depth classifiers: a robustness study

Contaminated training sets can highly affect the performance of classification rules. For this reason, robust supervised classifiers have been introduced. Amongst the many, this work focuses on depth-based classifiers, a class of methods which have been proven to enjoy some robustness properties. However, no robustness studies are available for them within a directional data framework. Here, their performance under some directional contamination schemes is evaluated. A comparison with the directional Bayes rule is also provided. Different directional specific contamination scenarios are introduced and discussed: antipodality and orthogonality of the contaminated distribution mean, and the directional mean shift outlier model.