r - How to repeat the Grubbs test and flag the outliers

Question

I am wanting to apply the Grubbs test to a set of data repeatedly until it ceases to find outliers. I want the outliers flagged rather than removed so that I can plot the data as a histogram with the outliers a different colour. I have used grubbs.test from the outliers package to manually identify outliers but cannot figure out how to cycle through them and flag them successfully. The sort of output I am aiming for is like the following:

X   Outlier
152.36  Yes
130.38  Yes
101.54  No
96.26   No
88.03   No
85.66   No
83.62   No
76.53   No
74.36   No
73.87   No
73.36   No
73.35   No
68.26   No
65.25   No
63.68   No
63.05   No
57.53   No

Answer 1

Looks like you would need a short function to do what you want:

library(outliers)
library(ggplot2)

X <- c(152.36,130.38,101.54,96.26,88.03,85.66,83.62,76.53,
       74.36,73.87,73.36,73.35,68.26,65.25,63.68,63.05,57.53)

grubbs.flag <- function(x) {
  outliers <- NULL
  test <- x
  grubbs.result <- grubbs.test(test)
  pv <- grubbs.result$p.value
  while(pv < 0.05) {
    outliers <- c(outliers,as.numeric(strsplit(grubbs.result$alternative," ")[[1]][3]))
    test <- x[!x %in% outliers]
    grubbs.result <- grubbs.test(test)
    pv <- grubbs.result$p.value
  }
  return(data.frame(X=x,Outlier=(x %in% outliers)))
}

Here's the output:

grubbs.flag(X)
         X Outlier
1   152.36    TRUE
2   130.38    TRUE
3   101.54   FALSE
4    96.26   FALSE
5    88.03   FALSE
6    85.66   FALSE
7    83.62   FALSE
8    76.53   FALSE
9    74.36   FALSE
10   73.87   FALSE
11   73.36   FALSE
12   73.35   FALSE
13   68.26   FALSE
14   65.25   FALSE
15   63.68   FALSE
16   63.05   FALSE
17   57.53   FALSE

And if you want a histogram with different colors, you can use the following:

ggplot(grubbs.flag(X),aes(x=X,color=Outlier,fill=Outlier))+
  geom_histogram(binwidth=diff(range(X))/30)+
  theme_bw()