Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis Based on lq Regularization

Linear discriminant analysis plays an important role in feature extraction, data dimensionality reduction, and classification. With the progress of science and technology, the data that need to be processed are becoming increasingly large. However, in high-dimensional situations, linear discriminant analysis faces two problems: the lack of interpretability of the projected data since they all involve all p features, which are linear combinations of all features, as well as the singularity problem of the within-class covariance matrix. There are three different arguments for linear discriminant analysis: multivariate Gaussian model, Fisher discrimination problem, and optimal scoring problem. To solve these two problems, this article establishes a model for solving the kth discriminant component, which first transforms the original model of Fisher discriminant problem in linear discriminant analysis by using a diagonal estimated matrix for the within-class variance in place of the original within-class covariance matrix, which overcomes the singularity problem of the matrix and projects it to an orthogonal projection space to remove its orthogonal constraints, and subsequently an lq norm regularization term is added to enhance its interpretability for the purpose of dimensionality reduction and classification. Finally, an iterative algorithm for solving the model and a convergence analysis are given, and it is proved that the sequence generated by the algorithm is descended and converges to a local minimum of the problem for any initial value.