
Preface
This book provides an introduction to statistical pattern recognition theory and techniques.
Most of the material presented is concerned with discrimination and classification and
has been drawn from a wide range of literature including that of engineering, statistics,
computer science and the social sciences. The book is an attempt to provide a concise
volume containing descriptions of many of the most useful of today’s pattern process-
ing techniques, including many of the recent advances in nonparametric approaches to
discrimination developed in the statistics literature and elsewhere. The techniques are
illustrated with examples of real-world applications studies. Pointers are also provided
to the diverse literature base where further details on applications, comparative studies
and theoretical developments may be obtained.
Statistical pattern recognition is a very active area of research. Many advances over
recent years have been due to the increased computational power available, enabling
some techniques to have much wider applicability. Most of the chapters in this book have
concluding sections that describe, albeit briefly, the wide range of practical applications
that have been addressed and further developments of theoretical techniques.
Thus, the book is aimed at practitioners in the ‘field’ of pattern recognition (if such
a multidisciplinary collection of techniques can be termed a field) as well as researchers
in the area. Also, some of this material has been presented as part of a graduate course
on information technology. A prerequisite is a knowledge of basic probability theory
and linear algebra, together with basic knowledge of mathematical methods (the use
of Lagrange multipliers to solve problems with equality and inequality constraints, for
example). Some basic material is presented as appendices. The exercises at the ends of
the chapters vary from ‘open book’ questions to more lengthy computer projects.
Chapter 1 provides an introduction to statistical pattern recognition, defining some ter-
minology, introducing supervised and unsupervised classification. Two related approaches
to supervised classification are presented: one based on the estimation of probability
density functions and a second based on the construction of discriminant functions. The
chapter concludes with an outline of the pattern recognition cycle, putting the remaining
chapters of the book into context. Chapters 2 and 3 pursue the density function approach
to discrimination, with Chapter 2 addressing parametric approaches to density estimation
and Chapter 3 developing classifiers based on nonparametric schemes.
Chapters 4–7 develop discriminant function approaches to supervised classification.
Chapter 4 focuses on linear discriminant functions; much of the methodology of this
chapter (including optimisation, regularisation and support vector machines) is used in
some of the nonlinear methods. Chapter 5 explores kernel-based methods, in particular,