Journal of Data Science

Analyzing “large p small n” data is becoming increasingly paramount in a wide range of application fields. As a projection pursuit index, the Penalized Discriminant Analysis ($\mathrm{PDA}$) index, built upon the Linear Discriminant Analysis ($\mathrm{LDA}$) index, is devised in Lee and Cook (2010) to classify high-dimensional data with promising results. Yet, there is little information available about its performance compared with the popular Support Vector Machine ($\mathrm{SVM}$). This paper conducts extensive numerical studies to compare the performance of the $\mathrm{PDA}$ index with the $\mathrm{LDA}$ index and $\mathrm{SVM}$, demonstrating that the $\mathrm{PDA}$ index is robust to outliers and able to handle high-dimensional datasets with extremely small sample sizes, few important variables, and multiple classes. Analyses of several motivating real-world datasets reveal the practical advantages and limitations of individual methods, suggesting that the $\mathrm{PDA}$ index provides a useful alternative tool for classifying complex high-dimensional data. These new insights, along with the hands-on implementation of the $\mathrm{PDA}$ index functions in the R package classPP, facilitate statisticians and data scientists to make effective use of both sets of classification tools.