Copyright © 2012 Alsaidi M. Altaher and Mohd Tahir Ismail. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Classical wavelet thresholding methods suffer from boundary problems caused by the application of the wavelet transformations to a finite signal. As a result, large bias at the edges and artificial wiggles occur when the classical boundary assumptions are not satisfied. Although polynomial wavelet regression and local polynomial wavelet regression effectively reduce the risk of this problem, the estimates from these two methods can be easily affected by the presence of correlated noise and outliers, giving inaccurate estimates. This paper introduces two robust methods in which the effects of boundary problems, outliers, and correlated noise are simultaneously taken into account. The proposed methods combine thresholding estimator with either a local polynomial model or a polynomial model using the generalized least squares method instead of the ordinary one. A primary step that involves removing the outlying observations through a statistical function is considered as well. The practical performance of the proposed methods has been evaluated through simulation experiments and real data examples. The results are strong evidence that the proposed method is extremely effective in terms of correcting the boundary bias and eliminating the effects of outliers and correlated noise.