Improved performance guarantees for Tukey's median

Abstract: Is there a natural way to order data in dimension greater than one? The approach based on the notion of data depth, often associated with the name of John Tukey, is among the most popular. Tukey's depth has found applications in robust statistics, graph theory, and the study of elections and social choice. We present improved performance guarantees for empirical Tukey's median, a deepest point associated with the given sample, when the data-generating distribution is elliptically symmetric and possibly anisotropic. Some of our results remain valid in the wider class of affine equivariant estimators. As a corollary of our bounds, we show that the diameter of the set of all empirical Tukey's medians scales like $o(n^{-1/2})$ where $n$ is the sample size. Moreover, when the data are 2-dimensional, we prove that the diameter is of order $O(n^{-3/4}\log^{3/2}(n))$.