LDA via L1-PCA of Whitened Data

Abstract

Principal component analysis (PCA) and Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are widespread techniques in data analysis and pattern recognition. Recently, the L1-norm has been proposed as an alternative criterion to classical L2-norm in PCA, drawing considerable research interest on account of its increased robustness to outliers. The present work proves that, combined with a whitening preprocessing step, L1-PCA can perform LDA in an unsupervised manner, i.e., sparing the need for labelled data. Rigorous proof is given in the case of data drawn from a mixture of Gaussians. A number of numerical experiments on synthetic as well as real data confirm the theoretical findings.