IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jmvana/v207y2025ics0047259x25000120.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Classification using global and local Mahalanobis distances

Author

Listed:
  • Ghosh, Annesha
  • Ghosh, Anil K.
  • SahaRay, Rita
  • Sarkar, Soham

Abstract

We propose a novel semiparametric classifier based on Mahalanobis distances of an observation from the competing classes. Our tool is a generalized additive model with the logistic link function that uses these distances as features to estimate the posterior probabilities of different classes. While popular parametric classifiers like linear and quadratic discriminant analyses are mainly motivated by the normality of the underlying distributions, the proposed classifier is more flexible and free from such parametric modeling assumptions. Since the densities of elliptic distributions are functions of Mahalanobis distances, this classifier works well when the competing classes are (nearly) elliptic. In such cases, it often outperforms popular nonparametric classifiers, especially when the sample size is small compared to the dimension of the data. To cope with non-elliptic and possibly multimodal distributions, we propose a local version of the Mahalanobis distance. Subsequently, we propose another classifier based on a generalized additive model that uses the local Mahalanobis distances as features. This nonparametric classifier usually performs like the Mahalanobis distance based semiparametric classifier when the underlying distributions are elliptic, but outperforms it for several non-elliptic and multimodal distributions. We also investigate the behavior of these two classifiers in high dimension, low sample size situations. A thorough numerical study involving several simulated and real datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed classifiers in comparison to many state-of-the-art methods.

Suggested Citation

  • Ghosh, Annesha & Ghosh, Anil K. & SahaRay, Rita & Sarkar, Soham, 2025. "Classification using global and local Mahalanobis distances," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 207(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jmvana:v:207:y:2025:i:c:s0047259x25000120
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmva.2025.105417
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X25000120
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jmva.2025.105417?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Peter Hall & J. S. Marron & Amnon Neeman, 2005. "Geometric representation of high dimension, low sample size data," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(3), pages 427-444, June.
    2. Kazuyoshi Yata & Makoto Aoshima, 2020. "Geometric consistency of principal component scores for high‐dimensional mixture models and its application," Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics;Finnish Statistical Society;Norwegian Statistical Association;Swedish Statistical Association, vol. 47(3), pages 899-921, September.
    3. C. C. Holmes & N. M. Adams, 2002. "A probabilistic nearest neighbour method for statistical pattern recognition," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 64(2), pages 295-306, May.
    4. Jeongyoun Ahn & J. S. Marron & Keith M. Muller & Yueh-Yun Chi, 2007. "The high-dimension, low-sample-size geometric representation holds under mild conditions," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 94(3), pages 760-766.
    5. Friedman, Jerome H. & Hastie, Trevor & Tibshirani, Rob, 2010. "Regularization Paths for Generalized Linear Models via Coordinate Descent," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 33(i01).
    6. Christopher C. Holmes, 2003. "Likelihood inference in nearest-neighbour classification models," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 90(1), pages 99-112, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Nakayama, Yugo & Yata, Kazuyoshi & Aoshima, Makoto, 2021. "Clustering by principal component analysis with Gaussian kernel in high-dimension, low-sample-size settings," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).
    2. Modarres, Reza, 2022. "A high dimensional dissimilarity measure," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).
    3. Yata, Kazuyoshi & Aoshima, Makoto, 2013. "PCA consistency for the power spiked model in high-dimensional settings," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 334-354.
    4. Jung, Sungkyu & Sen, Arusharka & Marron, J.S., 2012. "Boundary behavior in High Dimension, Low Sample Size asymptotics of PCA," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 190-203.
    5. Wang, Shao-Hsuan & Huang, Su-Yun, 2022. "Perturbation theory for cross data matrix-based PCA," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    6. Yugo Nakayama & Kazuyoshi Yata & Makoto Aoshima, 2020. "Bias-corrected support vector machine with Gaussian kernel in high-dimension, low-sample-size settings," Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Springer;The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 72(5), pages 1257-1286, October.
    7. Chung, Hee Cheol & Ahn, Jeongyoun, 2021. "Subspace rotations for high-dimensional outlier detection," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).
    8. Jun Li, 2018. "Asymptotic normality of interpoint distances for high-dimensional data with applications to the two-sample problem," Biometrika, Biometrika Trust, vol. 105(3), pages 529-546.
    9. Jung, Sungkyu, 2018. "Continuum directions for supervised dimension reduction," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 27-43.
    10. Xu, Kai & Cheng, Qing & He, Daojiang, 2025. "On summed nonparametric dependence measures in high dimensions, fixed or large samples," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 205(C).
    11. Yata, Kazuyoshi & Aoshima, Makoto, 2013. "Correlation tests for high-dimensional data using extended cross-data-matrix methodology," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 313-331.
    12. Kazuyoshi Yata & Makoto Aoshima, 2012. "Inference on High-Dimensional Mean Vectors with Fewer Observations Than the Dimension," Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 459-476, September.
    13. Borysov, Petro & Hannig, Jan & Marron, J.S., 2014. "Asymptotics of hierarchical clustering for growing dimension," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 465-479.
    14. Shen, Dan & Shen, Haipeng & Marron, J.S., 2013. "Consistency of sparse PCA in High Dimension, Low Sample Size contexts," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 317-333.
    15. Yinglei Lai & Baolin Wu & Hongyu Zhao, 2011. "A permutation test approach to the choice of size k for the nearest neighbors classifier," Journal of Applied Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 38(10), pages 2289-2302.
    16. Miecznikowski Jeffrey C. & Gaile Daniel P. & Chen Xiwei & Tritchler David L., 2016. "Identification of consistent functional genetic modules," Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, De Gruyter, vol. 15(1), pages 1-18, March.
    17. Makoto Aoshima & Kazuyoshi Yata, 2014. "A distance-based, misclassification rate adjusted classifier for multiclass, high-dimensional data," Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Springer;The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, vol. 66(5), pages 983-1010, October.
    18. Yata, Kazuyoshi & Aoshima, Makoto, 2012. "Effective PCA for high-dimension, low-sample-size data with noise reduction via geometric representations," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 105(1), pages 193-215.
    19. Yata, Kazuyoshi & Aoshima, Makoto, 2010. "Effective PCA for high-dimension, low-sample-size data with singular value decomposition of cross data matrix," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 101(9), pages 2060-2077, October.
    20. Wang, Shao-Hsuan & Huang, Su-Yun & Chen, Ting-Li, 2020. "On asymptotic normality of cross data matrix-based PCA in high dimension low sample size," Journal of Multivariate Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 175(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jmvana:v:207:y:2025:i:c:s0047259x25000120. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622892/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.