Huber＇s Minimax Approach in Distribution Classes with Bounded Variances and Subranges with Applications to Robust Detection of Signals

A brief survey of former and recent results on Huber‘s minimax approach in robust statistics is given. The least informative distributions minimizing Fisher information for location over several distribution classes with upper-bounded variances and subranges are written down. These least informative distributions are qualitatively different from classical Huber‘s solution and have the following common structure: (i) with relatively small variances they are short-tailed, in particular normal；(ii) with relatively large variances they are heavytailed, in particular the Laplace; (iii) they are compromise with relatively moderate variances. These results allow to raise the efficiency of minimax robust procedures retaining high stability as compared to classical Huber‘s procedure for contaminated normal populations. In application to signal detection problems, the proposed minimax detection rule has proved to be robust and close to Huber‘s for heavy-tailed distributions and more efficient than Huber‘s for short-tailed ones both in asymptotics and on finite samples。