Interactive Learning Tools

Although the intuitive idea of robustness is simple and appealing some key robustness concepts and measures are mathematically involved and hence difficult to grasp by students. We show how interactive graphic tools can be used to motivate and demonstrate the use of robust methods. We also show how interactive graphical tools can also be used to help understand and “visualize” main robustness concepts such as influence function and breakdown point. We developed interactive tools for simple linear regression and multivariate location and covariance matrix. Due to space limitation we focus on regression and only briefly comment on the multivariate location and covariance matrix.