Abstract
The linear and quadratic discrimination functions based on normal theory are widely used to classify an observation to one of predefined groups. But the discriminant functions are sensitive to outliers. A high breakdown procedure to estimate location and scatter of multivariate data is the minimum volume ellipsoid or MVE estimator To obtain high breakdown classifiers outliers in multivariate data are detected by using the robust Mahalanobis distance based on MVE estimators and the weighted estimators are inserted in the functions for classification. A samll-sample MOnte Carlo study shows that the high breakdown robust procedures perform better than the classical classifiers.