Worst-Case Linear Discriminant Analysis as Scalable Semidefinite Feasibility Problems

In this paper, we propose an efficient semidefinite programming (SDP) approach to worst-case linear discriminant analysis (WLDA). Compared with the traditional LDA, WLDA considers the dimensionality reduction problem from the worst-case viewpoint, which is in general more robust for classification. However, the original problem of WLDA is non-convex and difficult to optimize. In this paper, we reformulate the optimization problem of WLDA into a sequence of semidefinite feasibility problems. To efficiently solve the semidefinite feasibility problems, we design a new scalable optimization method with quasi-Newton methods and eigen-decomposition being the core components. The proposed method is orders of magnitude faster than standard interior-point based SDP solvers. Experiments on a variety of classification problems demonstrate that our approach achieves better performance than standard LDA. Our method is also much faster and more scalable than standard interior-point SDP solvers based WLDA. The computational complexity for an SDP with $m$ constraints and matrices of size $d$ by $d$ is roughly reduced from $\mathcal{O}(m^3+md^3+m^2d^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(d^3)$ ($m>d$ in our case).Comment: 14 page

Discriminant analysis under the common principal components model

For two or more populations of which the covariance matrices have a common set of eigenvectors, but different sets of eigenvalues, the common principal components (CPC) model is appropriate. Pepler et al. (2015) proposed a regularised CPC covariance matrix estimator and showed that this estimator outperforms the unbiased and pooled estimators in situations where the CPC model is applicable. This paper extends their work to the context of discriminant analysis for two groups, by plugging the regularised CPC estimator into the ordinary quadratic discriminant function. Monte Carlo simulation results show that CPC discriminant analysis offers significant improvements in misclassification error rates in certain situations, and at worst performs similar to ordinary quadratic and linear discriminant analysis. Based on these results, CPC discriminant analysis is recommended for situations where the sample size is small compared to the number of variables, in particular for cases where there is uncertainty about the population covariance matrix structures

Target Contrastive Pessimistic Discriminant Analysis

Domain-adaptive classifiers learn from a source domain and aim to generalize to a target domain. If the classifier's assumptions on the relationship between domains (e.g. covariate shift) are valid, then it will usually outperform a non-adaptive source classifier. Unfortunately, it can perform substantially worse when its assumptions are invalid. Validating these assumptions requires labeled target samples, which are usually not available. We argue that, in order to make domain-adaptive classifiers more practical, it is necessary to focus on robust methods; robust in the sense that the model still achieves a particular level of performance without making strong assumptions on the relationship between domains. With this objective in mind, we formulate a conservative parameter estimator that only deviates from the source classifier when a lower or equal risk is guaranteed for all possible labellings of the given target samples. We derive the corresponding estimator for a discriminant analysis model, and show that its risk is actually strictly smaller than that of the source classifier. Experiments indicate that our classifier outperforms state-of-the-art classifiers for geographically biased samples.Comment: 9 pages, no figures, 2 tables. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1706.0808

A note on stability conditions for planar switched systems

This paper is concerned with the stability problem for the planar linear switched system $\dot x(t)=u(t)A_1x(t)+(1-u(t))A_2x(t)$, where the real matrices $A_1,A_2\in \R^{2\times 2}$ are Hurwitz and $u(\cdot) [0,\infty[\to\{0,1\}$ is a measurable function. We give coordinate-invariant necessary and sufficient conditions on $A_1$ and $A_2$ under which the system is asymptotically stable for arbitrary switching functions $u(\cdot)$. The new conditions unify those given in previous papers and are simpler to be verified since we are reduced to study 4 cases instead of 20. Most of the cases are analyzed in terms of the function \Gamma(A_1,A_2)={1/2}(\tr(A_1) \tr(A_2)- \tr(A_1A_2)).Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure