Fisher’s pioneering work on discriminant analysis and its impact on Artificial Intelligence

Kanti V. Mardia

Journal of Multivariate Analysis, 2024, vol. 203, issue C

Abstract: Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher opened many new areas in Multivariate Analysis, and the one which we will consider is discriminant analysis. Several papers by Fisher and others followed from his seminal paper in 1936 where he coined the name discrimination function. Historically, his four papers on discriminant analysis during 1936–1940 connect to the contemporaneous pioneering work of Hotelling and Mahalanobis. We revisit the famous iris data which Fisher used in his 1936 paper and in particular, test the hypothesis of multivariate normality for the data which he assumed. Fisher constructed his genetic discriminant motivated by this application and we provide a deeper insight into this construction; however, this construction has not been well understood as far as we know. We also indicate how the subject has developed along with the computer revolution, noting newer methods to carry out discriminant analysis, such as kernel classifiers, classification trees, support vector machines, neural networks, and deep learning. Overall, with computational power, the whole subject of Multivariate Analysis has changed its emphasis but the impact of this Fisher’s pioneering work continues as an integral part of supervised learning in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Keywords: Canonical variates; Classification; Genetic discriminant; Iris data; Linear discriminant function; Machine learning; Mardia’s measures of skewness and kurtosis; Visualising multivariate data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X24000484
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jmvana:v:203:y:2024:i:c:s0047259x24000484

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.jmva.2024.105341

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Multivariate Analysis is currently edited by de Leeuw, J.

More articles in Journal of Multivariate Analysis from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().