  Sure Independence Screening is a fast procedure for variable selection in
ultra-high dimensional regression analysis. Unfortunately, its performance
greatly deteriorates with increasing dependence among the predictors. To solve
this issue, Factor Profiled Sure Independence Screening (FPSIS) models the
correlation structure of the predictor variables, assuming that it can be
represented by a few latent factors. The correlations can then be profiled out
by projecting the data onto the orthogonal complement of the subspace spanned
by these factors. However, neither of these methods can handle the presence of
outliers in the data. Therefore, we propose a robust screening method which
uses a least trimmed squares method to estimate the latent factors and the
factor profiled variables. Variable screening is then performed on factor
profiled variables by using regression MM-estimators. Different types of
outliers in this model and their roles in variable screening are studied. Both
simulation studies and a real data analysis show that the proposed robust
procedure has good performance on clean data and outperforms the two nonrobust
methods on contaminated data.
