Sparsifying the Fisher Linear Discriminant by Rotation

Many high dimensional classification techniques have been proposed in the literature based on sparse linear discriminant analysis (LDA). To efficiently use them, sparsity of linear classifiers is a prerequisite. However, this might not be readily available in many applications, and rotations of data are required to create the needed sparsity. In this paper, we propose a family of rotations to create the required sparsity. The basic idea is to use the principal components of the sample covariance matrix of the pooled samples and its variants to rotate the data first and to then apply an existing high dimensional classifier. This rotate-and-solve procedure can be combined with any existing classifiers, and is robust against the sparsity level of the true model. We show that these rotations do create the sparsity needed for high dimensional classifications and provide theoretical understanding why such a rotation works empirically. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by a number of simulated and real data examples, and the improvements of our method over some popular high dimensional classification rules are clearly shown.Comment: 30 pages and 9 figures. This paper has been accepted by Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology). The first two versions of this paper were uploaded to Bin Dong's web site under the title "A Rotate-and-Solve Procedure for Classification" in 2013 May and 2014 January. This version may be slightly different from the published versio

Indecomposable representations and oscillator realizations of the exceptional Lie algebra G_2

In this paper various representations of the exceptional Lie algebra G_2 are investigated in a purely algebraic manner, and multi-boson/multi-fermion realizations are obtained. Matrix elements of the master representation, which is defined on the space of the universal enveloping algebra of G_2, are explicitly determined. From this master representation, different indecomposable representations defined on invariant subspaces or quotient spaces with respect to these invariant subspaces are discussed. Especially, the elementary representations of G_2 are investigated in detail, and the corresponding six-boson realization is given. After obtaining explicit forms of all twelve extremal vectors of the elementary representation with the highest weight {\Lambda}, all representations with their respective highest weights related to {\Lambda} are systematically discussed. For one of these representations the corresponding five-boson realization is constructed. Moreover, a new three-fermion realization from the fundamental representation (0,1) of G_2 is constructed also.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure