Conditionally optimal classification based on CFAR and invariance property for blind receivers

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach for finding the conditionally optimal solution (the classifier with minimum error probability) for the classification problem where the observations are from the multivariate normal distribution. The optimal Bayes classifier does not exist when the covariance matrix is unknown for this problem. However, this paper proposes a classifier based on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) and invariance property. The proposed classifier is optimal conditionally as it has the minimum error probability in a subset of solutions. This approach has an analogy to hypothesis testing problems where uniformly most powerful invariant (UMPI) and uniformly most powerful unbiased (UMPU) detectors are used instead of the non-existing optimal UMP detector. Furthermore, this paper investigates using the proposed classifier for modulation classification as an application in signal processing.