Discriminant function analyses in archaeology: are classification rates too good to be true?
By K. Kovarovic, L. Aiello, A. Cardini, C. Lockwood. 2011
219 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The use of discriminant function analyses (DFA) in archaeological and related research is on the increase, however many of the assumptions of this method receive a mixed treatment in the literature. Statisticians frequently use complex statistical models to investigate analytical parameters, but such idealised datasets may be hard to relate to “real-life” examples and the literature difficult to assess. Using two faunal datasets that are more typical of archaeological and related research, one comprised of size-corrected linear measurements of bovid humeri and another of 3D geometric morphometric (GMM) shape data of African monkey skulls, and two simulated datasets, we illustrate some of the most important but often ignored issues of DFA. We specifically show why it is paramount to address “over-fitting” by cross-validation when applying this method and how the probability of correctly classifying cases by chance can be properly and explicitly taken into account.
Subfields: Anthropology, Archeology, Geometry and Topology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e10965181149c5638396e66562d2fa8453d23f0
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In Anthropology
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In Geometry and Topology
Citations in the corpus
- The long and winding road: identifying pig domestication through molar size and shape (2013, methodology): “…accuracy, a positive bias in CVPs is most likely to be found, as in our case study, and a random chance baseline should be estimated to interpret how good a classification is (Kovarovic et al., 2011) and, if possible, the sensitivity of results to uneven sampling explored using balanced subsamples.”