Discriminant analysis (DA) helps to determine which variables discriminate between two or more naturally occurring groups. Mathematically equivalent to MANOVA, it ' is extensively used when a set of explanatory variables are used to predict the group to which a given unit belongs (which is a nominal dependent variables). It cornhines the explanatory variables in order to create the largest F when the groups are used as a fixed factor in an ANOVA.

The model is constructed with a set of observations for which the classes are known. The set of observations are sometimes referred to as the training set.