Stochastic Approximation for Multivariate and Functional Median

Abstract

We propose a very simple algorithm in order to estimate the geometric median, also called spatial median, of multivariate (Small (1990)) or functional data (Gervini (2008)) when the sample size is large. A simple and fast iterative approach based on the Robbins-Monro algorithm (Duflo (1997)) as well as its averaged version (Polyak and Juditsky (1992)) are shown to be effective for large samples of high dimension data. They are very fast and only require O(Nd) elementary operations, where N is the sample size and d is the dimension of data. The averaged approach is shown to be more effective and less sensitive to the tuning parameter. The ability of this new estimator to estimate accurately and rapidly (about thirty times faster than the classical estimator) the geometric median is illustrated on a large sample of 18902 electricity consumption curves measured every half an hour during one week.