Median polish

The median polish is a simple and robust exploratory data analysis procedure proposed by the statistician John Tukey. The purpose of median polish is to find an additively-fit model for data in a two-way layout table (usually, results from a factorial experiment) of the form row effect + column effect + overall median.

Median polish utilizes the medians obtained from the rows and the columns of a two-way table to iteratively calculate the row effect and column effect on the data. The results are not meant to be sensitive to the outliers, as the iterative procedure uses the medians rather than the means.