Discriminant Analysis: An Analysis of Its Predictship Function

Abstract

Discriminant analysis as a multivariate statistical method was reviewed in this paper.  Alongside this was the general goal of discriminate analysis which is to predict membership from a set of predictor as well as to classify individuals into one of two or more alternative groups on the basis of a set of measurements. Discriminant analysis builds a predictive model for group membership. This model is composed of a discriminant function (or, for more than two groups, a set of discriminant functions). The discriminate function coefficients gives the contribution of each variable to the function. In order to derive more substantive "meaningful" labels for the discriminant functions, one can also examine the factor structure matrix with the correlations between the variables and the discriminant functions as well as other statistics associated with discriminate analysis.

Keywords: Discriminate analysis, discriminate function, prediction, classification discriminate function coefficients.

DOI: 10.7176/JEP/10-5-04