Discriminant Analysis under a Patterned Missing Values

This paper suggests a classification rule with unequal covariance matrices when a patterned incomplete data are involved in the discriminant analysis. This is an extension of Geisser's (1966) result to the case of missing observations. For the calssificaiton rule, we introduce an algorithm which contains data augmentation step and Monte Carlo integration step and show that the algorithm yields a consistant estimator of true classification probability. The proposed method is compared to the complete observation vector method through a Monte Carlo study. The results show that the suggested method, in general, performs better than the complete observation vector method which ignores those vectors of observation with one or more missing values from the analysis. The results also verify the consistency of the algorithm.