Permanents, order statistics, outliers, and robustness

In this paper, we consider order statistics and outlier models, and focus primarily on multiple-outlier models and associated robustness issues. We first synthesise recent developments on order statistics arising from independent and non-identically distributed random variables based primarily on the theory of permanents. We then highlight various applications of these results in evaluating the robustness properties of several linear estimators when multiple outliers are possibly present in the sample.