Feature extraction for nonparametric discriminant analysis

In high-dimensional classification problems, one is often interested in finding a few important discriminant directions in order to reduce the dimensionality. Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a commonly used method. Although LDA is guaranteed to find the best directions when each class has a Gaussian density with a common covariance matrix, it can fail if the class densities are more general. Using a likelihood-based interpretation of Fisher's LDA criterion, we develop a general method for finding important discriminant directions without assuming the class densities belong to any particular parametric family. We also show that our method can be easily integrated with projection pursuit density estimation to produce a powerful procedure for (reduced-rank) nonparametric discriminant analysis.