On the Equivalence of Linear Discriminant Analysis and Least Squares Regression

Studying the relationship between linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and least squares regression (LSR) is of great theoretical and practical significance. It is well-known that the two-class LDA is equivalent to an LSR problem, and directly casting multiclass LDA as an LSR problem, however, becomes more challenging. Recent study reveals that the equivalence between multiclass LDA and LSR can be established based on a special class indicator matrix, but under a mild condition which may not hold under the scenarios with low-dimensional or oversampled data. In this article, we show that the equivalence between multiclass LDA and LSR can be established based on arbitrary linearly independent class indicator vectors and without any condition. In addition, we show that LDA is also equivalent to a constrained LSR based on the data-dependent indicator vectors. It can be concluded that under exactly the same mild condition, such two regressions are both equivalent to the null space LDA method. Illuminated by the equivalence of LDA and LSR, we propose a direct LDA classifier to replace the conventional framework of LDA plus extra classifier. Extensive experiments well validate the above theoretic analysis.