Effect of outliers on the variable selection by the regularized regression

Many studies exist on the influence of one or few observations on estimators in a variety of statistical models under the "large n, small p" setup; however, diagnostic issues in the regression models have been rarely studied in a high dimensional setup. In the high dimensional data, the influence of observations is more serious because the sample size n is significantly less than the number variables p. Here, we investigate the influence of observations on the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) estimates, suggested by Tibshirani (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 73, 273-282, 1996), and the influence of observations on selected variables by the LASSO in the high dimensional setup. We also derived an analytic expression for the influence of the k observation on LASSO estimates in simple linear regression. Numerical studies based on artificial data and real data are done for illustration. Numerical results showed that the influence of observations on the LASSO estimates and the selected variables by the LASSO in the high dimensional setup is more severe than that in the usual "large n, small p" setup.