The Discriminant Analysis process is one of a series of predictive modeling processes provided by JMP Clinical and JMP Genomics to help you make the best predictions for your system based on the data that you have collected and analyzed. Discriminant Analysis is a classical statistical method for predicting a classification
variable from a set of continuous responses. Normal (Fisher) discriminant analysis fits a multivariate normal
distribution to each class, and can be regarded as inverse prediction from a multivariate analysis of
variance.
Typically, it is not easy to tell beforehand which predictive model best fits your data. You should, therefore, plan to run your data through several, if not all, of the predictive models to find out which
model works best. The
Cross Validation Model Comparison process is especially useful for this task. See
Cross Validation Model Comparison for more details.
The adsl_dii.sas7bdat data set, used in the following example, consists of 906 rows of individuals with 382 columns corresponding to data on these individuals. It was generated from the original nicardipine ADSL data set described in Nicardipine and is included with JMP Clinical
. This data set is partially shown below.