A variable selection procedure for depth measures

Abstract

We herein introduce variable selection procedures based on depth similarity, aimed at identifying a small subset of variables that can better explain the depth assigned to each point in space. Our study is not intended to deal with the case of high-dimensional data. Identifying noisy and dependent variables helps us understand the underlying distribution of a given dataset. The asymptotic behaviour of the proposed methods and numerical aspects concerning the computational burden are studied. Furthermore, simulations and a real data example are analysed.