In this paper, we propose a new variant of Linear Discriminant Analysis to overcome underlying drawbacks of traditional LDA and other LDA variants targeting problems involving imbalanced classes. Traditional LDA sets assumptions related to Gaussian class distribution and neglects influence of outlier classes, that might hurt in performance. We exploit intuitions coming from a probabilistic interpretation of visual saliency estimation in order to define saliency of a class in multi-class setting. Such information is then used to redefine the between-class and within-class scatters in a more robust manner. Compared to traditional LDA and other weight-based LDA variants, the proposed method has shown certain improvements on facial image classification problems in publicly available datasets.
The linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most traditional linear dimensionality reduction methods. This paper incorporates the inter-class relationships as relevance weights into the estimation of the overall within-class scatter matrix in order to improve the performance of the basic LDA method and some of its improved variants. We demonstrate that in some specific situations the standard multi-class LDA almost totally fails to find a discriminative subspace if the proposed relevance weights are not incorporated. In order to estimate the relevance weights of individual within-class scatter matrices, we propose several methods of which one employs the evolution strategies. We derive a class of computationally inexpensive linear dimension reduction criteria by introducing a weighted variant of the well-known K-class Fisher criterion associated with linear discriminant analysis (LDA). It can be seen that LDA weights contributions of individual class pairs according to the Euclidean distance of the respective class means. We generalize upon LDA by introducing a different weighting function.