A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Spatial depth for data in metric spaces




AuthorsVirta, Joni

PublisherWiley

Publication year2026

Journal: Scandinavian Journal of Statistics

ISSN0303-6898

eISSN1467-9469

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1111/sjos.70054

Publication's open availability at the time of reportingOpen 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 addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/509033538

Self-archived copy's licenceCC BY

Self-archived copy's versionPublisher`s PDF


Abstract

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.


Last updated on 16/02/2026 08:44:16 AM