Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2021 iii Paper 223 2 a Solution 2026-09-28
Put and . Symmetry gives . Differentiating the trimmed mean functional along givesUnder the substitution , symmetry implieswhileEvaluating the last integral in the three regions , , and yieldsThis is the influence function of a trimmed mean, namely the Huber score with clipping parameter , divided by .
Trimmed mean Created 2026-09-28 Updated 2026-11-05
For , an -trimmed mean sorts observations, removes the smallest and largest , and averages the remaining values. It limits the effect of a small number of extreme observations while still averaging a central portion of the data.
For and , removing and gives trimmed mean , compared with sample mean . Replacing by a larger value leaves this trimmed mean unchanged. Replacing enough observations can still move the retained central values arbitrarily far.
For a probability distribution with quantile function , the population statistical functional isThe normalizing denominator is the retained fraction of probability. At a regular symmetric reference probability distribution, the influence function of a trimmed mean is a clipped version of the observation, scaled by this fraction. Centering and symmetry assumptions matter when using that simpler expression.