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I need your help with a Statistical Learning homework in R. I have to perform classification over this dataset: mammographic masses predicting Severity (0="not severe",1 = "severe) using these predictors:

  • Age (quantitative)
  • Margin (qualitative)
  • Shape (qualitative)

Everything is fine and understandable when I use logistic regression, but I don't know if it's possible to run QDA (or linear discriminant analysis either), since two of the variables are qualitative.

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My answer would be no you cannot use the usual form of LDA or QDA if your data points are binary. The reason for this is the following:

  • LDA and QDA require you to estimate several parameters of a multivariate gaussian distribution: the mean(s), the covariance matrix
  • How would you fit a multivariate gaussian on data that can only be equal to 0 or 1 ?

In his lecture notes, Andrew Ng specifically states that the assumption behind LDA is that the X data is continuous

See here:

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