The CANDISC Procedure

Canonical discriminant analysis is a dimension-reduction technique related to principal component analysis and canonical correlation. The methodology that is used in deriving the canonical coefficients parallels that of a one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). MANOVA tests for equality of the mean vector across class levels. Canonical discriminant analysis finds linear combinations of the quantitative variables that provide maximal separation between classes or groups. Given a classification variable and several quantitative variables, the CANDISC procedure derives canonical variables, which are linear combinations of the quantitative variables that summarize between-class variation in much the same way that principal components summarize total variation.

The CANDISC procedure performs a canonical discriminant analysis, computes squared Mahalanobis distances between class means, and performs both univariate and multivariate one-way analyses of variance. Two output data sets can be produced: one that contains the canonical coefficients and another that contains, among other things, scored canonical variables. You can rotate the canonical coefficients by using the FACTOR procedure. It is customary to standardize the canonical coefficients so that the canonical variables have means that are equal to 0 and pooled within-class variances that are equal to 1. PROC CANDISC displays both standardized and unstandardized canonical coefficients. Correlations between the canonical variables and the original variables in addition to the class means for the canonical variables are also displayed; these correlations, sometimes known as loadings, are called canonical structures. To aid the visual interpretation of group differences, you can use ODS Graphics to display graphs of pairs of canonical variables from the scored canonical variables output data set.

When you have two or more groups of observations that have measurements on several quantitative variables, canonical discriminant analysis derives a linear combination of the variables that has the highest possible multiple correlation with the groups. This maximal multiple correlation is called the first canonical correlation. The coefficients of the linear combination are the canonical coefficients or canonical weights. The variable that is defined by the linear combination is the first canonical variable or canonical component. The second canonical correlation is obtained by finding the linear combination uncorrelated with the first canonical variable that has the highest possible multiple correlation with the groups. The process of extracting canonical variables can be repeated until the number of canonical variables equals the number of original variables or the number of classes minus one, whichever is smaller.

The first canonical correlation is at least as large as the multiple correlation between the groups and any of the original variables. If the original variables have high within-group correlations, the first canonical correlation can be large even if all the multiple correlations are small. In other words, the first canonical variable can show substantial differences between the classes, even if none of the original variables do. Canonical variables are sometimes called discriminant functions, but this usage is ambiguous because the DISCRIM procedure produces very different functions for classification that are also called discriminant functions.

For each canonical correlation, PROC CANDISC tests the hypothesis that it and all smaller canonical correlations are zero in the population. An F approximation (Rao, 1973; Kshirsagar, 1972) is used that gives better small-sample results than the usual chi-square approximation. The variables should have an approximate multivariate normal distribution within each class, with a common covariance matrix in order for the probability levels to be valid.

Canonical discriminant analysis is equivalent to canonical correlation analysis between the quantitative variables and a set of dummy variables coded from the CLASS variable. Performing canonical discriminant analysis is also equivalent to performing the following steps:

An interesting property of the canonical variables is that they are uncorrelated whether the correlation is calculated from the total sample or from the pooled within-class correlations. However, the canonical coefficients are not orthogonal, so the canonical variables do not represent perpendicular directions through the space of the original variables.