A comparative study of the effect of the position of outliers in classical and nontraditional approaches to the two-group classification problem

Popularity of nontraditional approaches to the statistical classification problem has resulted from the potential of these techniques to outperform the standard parametric procedures under conditions when nonnormality is present. Thus proponents of these nontraditional models have recommended these models when outliers are in the data. However, research showing that these nontraditional models' performances can vary widely depending on where the outlier data are located has not been fully illustrated. The research in this paper demonstrates how the mathematical programming approaches and the nearest neighbor discriminant models can be affected by the position of contaminated normal data and that each of the models studied in this paper may not be robust to all types of outliers in the data. The results of this paper are also important because the study compares two recently proposed mathematical programming models as well as two versions of the nearest neighbor model with the standard classical parametric models. This combination of classification models does not appear to have been studied together under conditions of contaminated normal data in which numerous positions of the outliers are considered.