Binary classification on compositional data

Abstract

Due to boundedness and sum constraint, compositional data are often transformed by logratio transformation and their transformed data are put into traditional binary classification or discriminant analysis. However, it may be problematic to directly apply traditional multivariate approaches to the transformed data because class distributions are not Gaussian and Bayes decision boundary are not polynomial on the transformed space. In this study, we propose to use flexible classification approaches to transformed data for compositional data classification. Empirical studies using synthetic and real examples demonstrate that flexible approaches outperform traditional multivariate classification or discriminant analysis.