JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Statistical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Statistical Association.Classifying an observation into one of several populations is discriminant analysis, or classification. Relating qualitative variables to other variables through a logistic cdf functional form is logistic regression. Estimators generated for one of these problems are often used in the other. If the populations are normal with identical covariance matrices, discriminant analysis estimators are preferred to logistic regression estimators for the discriminant analysis problem. In most discriminant analysis applications, however, at least one variable is qualitative (ruling out multivariate normality). Under nonnormality, we prefer the logistic regression model with maximum likelihood estimators for solving both problems. In this article we summarize the related arguments, and report on our own supportive empirical studies.
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