Regularization is the process of finding a small set of predictors that yield an effective
predictive model. Linear discriminant analysis includes two parameters that control
regularization, γ and δ. cvshrink helps you select appropriate values of the parameters.
Let Σ represent the covariance matrix of the data X, and let be the centered data (the data X minus the mean by
class).
The regularized covariance matrix is
When γ ≥ MinGamma, is nonsingular.
Let μk be the mean vector for those elements of
X in class k, and let
μ0 be the global mean vector (the mean of the
rows of X). Let C be the correlation matrix of the
data X, and let be the regularized correlation matrix.
where I is the identity matrix.
The linear term in the regularized discriminant analysis classifier
for a data point x is
The parameter δ enters into this equation
as a threshold on the final term in square brackets. Each component
of the vector is set to zero
if it is smaller in magnitude than the threshold δ.
Therefore, for class k, if component j is
thresholded to zero, component j of x does
not enter into the evaluation of the posterior probability.
The DeltaPredictor property is a vector related
to this threshold. When δ ≥ DeltaPredictor(i), all classes k have
Therefore, when δ ≥ DeltaPredictor(i), the regularized
classifier does not use predictor i.