Minimum volume ellipsoid is a term for ellipsoid of the minimum volume which covers some specified proportion of the set of multivariate data. It is commonly used to construct robust estimators of the mean vectors and variance-covariance matrices. Such type of estimators has a high breakdown point but is computationally expensive. For instance, for an n × q data matrix X, if h is the integer part of n(n+1)/2 then volumes of n!/(h-n)! Ellipsoids required to be considered to find one with the minimum volume. So for the n=20 there are 184 756 ellipsoids and for the n=30 more than 155 million ellipsoids