# A Harmonic Mean Linear Discriminant Analysis for Robust Image Classification Source: [A Harmonic Mean Linear Discriminant Analysis for Robust Image Classification]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T20:27:18.446Z Authors: Shuai Zheng, Feiping Nie, Chris Ding, Heng Huang Published: 2016-10-14T20:36:57.000Z ## Abstract Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a widely-used supervised dimensionality reduction method in computer vision and pattern recognition. In null space based LDA (NLDA), a well-known LDA extension, between-class distance is maximized in the null space of the within-class scatter matrix. However, there are some limitations in NLDA. Firstly, for many data sets, null space of within-class scatter matrix does not exist, thus NLDA is not applicable to those datasets. Secondly, NLDA uses arithmetic mean of between-class distances and gives equal consideration to all between-class distances, which makes larger between-class distances can dominate the result and thus limits the performance of NLDA. In this paper, we propose a harmonic mean based Linear Discriminant Analysis, Multi-Class Discriminant Analysis (MCDA), for image classification, which minimizes the reciprocal of weighted harmonic mean of pairwise between-class distance. More importantly, MCDA gives higher priority to maximize small between-class distances. MCDA can be extended to multi-label dimension reduction. Results on 7 single-label data sets and 4 multi-label data sets show that MCDA has consistently better performance than 10 other single-label approaches and 4 other multi-label approaches in terms of classification accuracy, macro and micro average F1 score. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()