Fast rate of convergence in high-dimensional linear discriminant analysis

Abstract

This paper gives a theoretical analysis of high-dimensional linear discrimination of Gaussian data. We study the excess risk of linear discriminant rules. We emphasis the poor performances of standard procedures in the case when dimension p is larger than sample size n. The corresponding theoretical results are non-asymptotic lower bounds. On the other hand, we propose two discrimination procedures based on dimensionality reduction and provide associated rates of convergence which can be O(log(p)/n) under sparsity assumptions. Finally, all our results rely on a theorem that provides simple sharp relations between the excess risk and an estimation error associated with the geometric parameters defining the used discrimination rule.