On the structure of the quadratic subspace in discriminant analysis

The concept of quadratic subspace is introduced as a helpful tool for dimension reduction in quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). It is argued that an adequate representation of the quadratic subspace may lead to better methods for both data representation and classification. Several theoretical results describe the structure of the quadratic subspace, that is shown to contain some of the subspaces previously proposed in the literature for finding differences between the class means and covariances. A suitable assumption of orthogonality between location and dispersion subspaces allows us to derive a convenient reduced version of the full QDA rule. The behavior of these ideas in practice is illustrated with three real data examples.