Discrimination and Allocation

Abstract

Consider the eight populations of people determined by all combinations of sex (male, female) and age (adult, adolescent, child, infant). These are commonly used distinctions, but the populations are not clearly defined. It is not obvious when infants become children, when children become adolescents, nor when adolescents become adults. On the other hand, most people can clearly be identified as members of one of these eight groups. It might be of interest to see whether one can discriminate among these populations on the basis of, say, various aspects of their blood chemistry. The discrimination problem is sometimes referred to as the problem of separation. Another potentially interesting problem is trying to predict the population of a new individual given only the information on their blood chemistry. The problem of predicting the population of a new case is referred to as the problem of allocation. Other names for this problem are identification and classification.