A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Spatial depth for data in metric spaces
Authors: Virta, Joni
Publisher: Wiley
Publication year: 2026
Journal: Scandinavian Journal of Statistics
ISSN: 0303-6898
eISSN: 1467-9469
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.70054
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Partially Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.70054
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/509033538
Self-archived copy's licence: CC BY
Self-archived copy's version: Publisher`s PDF
We propose a novel measure of statistical depth, the metric spatial depth, for data residing in an arbitrary metric space. The measure assigns high (low) values for points located near (far away from) the bulk of the data distribution, allowing quantifying their centrality/outlyingness. This depth measure is shown to have highly interpretable properties, making it appealing in object data analysis where standard descriptive statistics are difficult to compute. The proposed measure reduces to the classical spatial depth in a Euclidean space. In addition to studying its theoretical properties, to provide intuition on the concept, we explicitly compute metric spatial depths in several different metric spaces. Finally, we showcase the practical usefulness of the metric spatial depth in outlier detection, non-convex depth region estimation and classification.
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Funding information in the publication:
This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland (grants 347501 and 353769). Open access publishing facilitated by Turun yliopisto, as part of the Wiley - FinELib agreement.