Composite Discriminant Factor analysis

We propose a linear dimensionality reduction method, Composite Discriminant Factor (CDF) analysis, which searches for a discriminative but compact feature subspace that can be used as input to classifiers that suffer from problems such as multi-collinearity or the curse of dimensionality. The subspace selected by CDF maximizes the performance of the entire classification pipeline, and is chosen from a set of candidate subspaces that are each discriminative. Our method is based on Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, and can be viewed as a generalization of the PLS1 algorithm, designed to increase discrimination in classification tasks. We demonstrate our approach on the UCF50 action recognition dataset, two object detection datasets (INRIA pedestrians and vehicles from aerial imagery), and machine learning datasets from the UCI Machine Learning repository. Experimental results show that the proposed approach improves significantly in terms of accuracy over linear SVM, and also over PLS in terms of compactness and efficiency, while maintaining or improving accuracy.