Measuring the robustness of sequential methods

Whenever we apply methods for processing data, we make a number of model assumptions. In reality, these assumptions are not always correct. Robust methods can withstand model inaccuracies, that is, despite some incorrect assumptions they can still produce good results. We often want to know how robust employed methods are. To that end we need to have a yardstick for measuring robustness. In this paper, we propose an approach for constructing such metrics for sequential methods. These metrics are derived from the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between the cumulative distribution functions of the actual observations and the ones based on the assumed model. The use of the proposed metrics is demonstrated with simulation examples.