On the trace ratio method and Fisher's discriminant analysis for robust multigroup classification
We compare two different linear dimensionality reduction strategies for the multigroup classification problem: the trace ratio method and Fisher's discriminant analysis. Recently, trace ratio optimization has gained in popularity due to its computational efficiency for high-dimensional data, as well as occasionally better classification results. However, a statistical understanding is still incomplete. We study and compare the properties of the two methods. Then, we propose a robust version of the trace ratio method, to handle the presence of outliers in the data. We reinterpret an asymptotic perturbation bound for the solution to the trace ratio, in a contamination setting. Finally, we compare the performance of the trace ratio method and Fisher's discriminant analysis on both synthetic and real datasets, using classical and robust estimators.
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