A Robust Metric for Screening Outliers from Analogue Product Manufacturing Tests Responses

Mahalanobis distance is one of the commonly used multivariate metrics for finely segregating defective devices from non-defective ones. An associated problem with this approach is the estimation of a robust mean and a covariance matrix. In the absence of such robust estimates, especially in the presence of outliers to test-response measurements, and only a sub-sample from the population is available, the distance metric becomes unreliable. To circumvent this problem, multiple Mahalanobis distances are calculated from selected sets of test-response measurements. They are then suitably formulated to derive a metric that has a reduced variance and robust to shifts or deviations in measurements. In this paper, such a formulation is proposed to qualitatively screen product outliers and quantitatively measure the reliability of the non-defective ones. The application of method is exemplified over a test set of an industrial automobile product.