An information measure for class discrimination

This article describes a separability measure for class discrimination. This measure is based on the Fisher information measure for estimating the mixing proportion of two classes. The Fisher information measure not only provides a means to assess quantitatively the information content in the features for separating classes, but also gives the lower bound for the variance of any unbiased estimate of the mixing proportion based on observations of the features. Unlike most commonly used separability measures, this measure is not dependent on the form of the probability distribution of the features and does not imply a specific estimation procedure. This is important because the probability distribution function that describes the data for a given class does not have simple analytic forms, such as a Gaussian. Results of applying this measure to compare the information content provided by three Landsat-derived feature vectors for the purpose of separating small grains from other crops are presented.