Discriminant Analysis on Categorical Variables

Arun There may be some confusion over terminology here. First, for the sake of clarity, I should mention that I will use the term, "predictor" to indicate those (continuous or categorical) variables that are being used to make predictions via a model, not the one that contains the original known classification. I would usually refer to this as the "target", "response" or "output" variable. Second, I would normally think of discriminant and classification methods as doing the same thing - generating a model that will allow you to predict group/class membership from a set of training data with a known grouping variable. In machine learning this is usually referred to as supervised learning.