Linear discriminant analysis and the related Fisher's linear discriminant are methods used in statistics and machine learning to find the linear combination of features which best separate two or more classes of objects or events. The resulting combination may be used as a linear classifier, or, more commonly, for dimensionality reduction before later classification.LDA is closely related to ANOVA and regression analysis, which also attempt to express one dependent variable as a linear combination of other features or measurements. In the other two methods however, the dependent variable is a numerical quantity, while for LDA it is a categorical variable.LDA is also closely related to principal component analysis and factor analysis in that both look for linear combinations of variables which best explain the data. LDA explicitly attempts to model the difference between the classes of data.