In high dimension, low sample size (HDLSS) settings, distance concentration phenomena affects the performance of several popular classifiers which are based on Euclidean distances. The behaviour of these classifiers in high dimensions is completely governed by the first and second order moments of the underlying class distributions. Moreover, the classifiers become useless for such HDLSS data when the first two moments of the competing distributions are equal, or when the moments do not exist. In this work, we propose robust, computationally efficient and tuning-free classifiers applicable in the HDLSS scenario. As the data dimension increases, these classifiers yield perfect classification if the one-dimensional marginals of the underlying distributions are different. We establish strong theoretical properties for the proposed classifiers in ultrahigh-dimensional settings. Numerical experiments with a wide variety of simulated examples and analysis of real data sets exhibit clear and convincing advantages over existing methods.

In high dimension, low sample size (HDLSS) settings, classifiers based on Euclidean distances like the nearest neighbor classifier and the average distance classifier perform quite poorly if differences between locations of the underlying populations get masked by scale differences. To rectify this problem, several modifications of these classifiers have been proposed in the literature. However, existing methods are confined to location and scale differences only, and they often fail to discriminate among populations differing outside of the first two moments. In this article, we propose some simple transformations of these classifiers resulting in improved performance even when the underlying populations have the same location and scale. We further propose a generalization of these classifiers based on the idea of grouping of variables. High-dimensional behavior of the proposed classifiers is studied theoretically. Numerical experiments with a variety of simulated examples as well as an extensive analysis of benchmark data sets from three different databases exhibit advantages of the proposed methods.

In this article, we develop and investigate a new classifier based on features extracted using spatial depth. Our construction is based on fitting a generalized additive model to posterior probabilities of different competing classes. To cope with possible multi-modal as well as non-elliptic nature of the population distribution, we also develop a localized version of spatial depth and use that with varying degrees of localization to build the classifier. Final classification is done by aggregating several posterior probability estimates, each of which is obtained using this localized spatial depth with a fixed scale of localization. The proposed classifier can be conveniently used even when the dimension of the data is larger than the sample size, and its good discriminatory power for such data has been established using theoretical as well as numerical results.