What is "l-estimator"

n. (context statistics English) Any estimator that is a linear combination of order statistics of the measurements.

In statistics, an L-estimator is an estimator which is an L-statistic – a linear combination of order statistics of the measurements. This can be as little as a single point, as in the median (of an odd number of values), or as many as all points, as in the mean.

The main benefits of L-estimators are that they are often extremely simple, and often robust statistics: assuming sorted data, they are very easy to calculate and interpret, and are often resistant to outliers. They thus are useful in robust statistics, as descriptive statistics, in statistics education, and when computation is difficult. However, they are inefficient, and in modern robust statistics M-estimators are preferred, though these are much more difficult computationally. In many circumstances L-estimators are reasonably efficient, and thus adequate for initial estimation.