The minimum covariance determinant (MCD) method of Rousseeuw (1984) is a highly robust
estimator of multivariate location and scatter. Its ob jective is to nd h observations(out of n)
whose covariance matrix has the lowest determinant. Until now applications of the MCD were
hampered by the computation time of existing algorithms, which were limited to a few hundred
ob jects in a few dimensions. We discuss two important applications of larger size: one about a
production process at Philips with n = 677 ob jects and p = 9 variables, and a data set from
astronomy with n =137,256 ob jects and p = 27 variables. To deal with such problems we have
developed a new algorithm for the MCD, called FAST-MCD. The basic ideas are an inequality
involving order statistics and determinants, and techniques which we call `selective iteration' and `nested extensions'. For small data sets FAST-MCD typically nds the exact MCD, whereas for
larger data sets it gives more accurate results than existing algorithms and is faster by orders of magnitude. Moreover, FAST-MCD is able to detect an exact t, i.e. a hyperplane containing h or
more observations. The new algorithm makes the MCD method available as a routine tool for analyzing multivariate data. We also propose the distance-distance plot (or `D-D plot') which displays MCD-based robust distances versus Mahalanobis distances, and illustrate it with some examples.