Robust estimation of dimension reduction space

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions. Two recently proposed methods, minimum average variance estimation and outer product of gradients, can be and are made robust in such a way that preserves all advantages of the original approach. Their extension based on the local one-step M-estimators is sufficiently robust to outliers and data from heavy-tailed distributions, it is relatively easy to implement, and surprisingly, it performs as well as the original methods when applied to normally distributed data.