| Abstract: | Four discriminant models were compared in a simulation study: Fisher's linear discriminant function [14], Smith's quadratic discriminant function [34], the logistic discriminant model, and a model based on linear programming [17]. The study was conducted to estimate expected rates of misclassification for these four procedures when observations were sampled from a variety of normal and nonnormal distributions. In contrast to previous research, data were taken from four types of Kurtotic population distributions. The results indicate the four discriminant procedures are robust toward data from many types of distributions. The misclassification rates for both the logistic discriminant model and the formulation based on linear programming consistently decreased as the kurtosis in the data increased. The decreases, however, were of small magnitude. None of these procedures yielded statistically significant lower rates of misclassification under nonnormality. The quadratic discriminant function produced significantly lower error rates when the variances across groups were heterogeneous. |
