discriminant distance

Type: Concept

As of November 2026, discriminant distance has been mentioned in one podcast episode on Institute for Advanced Study (Dec 2025). A type of distance discussed in the context of contact geometry.

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA), normal discriminant analysis (NDA), canonical variates analysis (CVA), or discriminant function analysis is a generalization of Fisher's linear discriminant, a method used in statistics and other fields, to find a linear combination of features that characterizes or separates two or more classes of objects or events. The resulting combination may be used as a linear classifier, or, more commonly, for dimensionality reduction before later classification.