Similar to a PCA, except that group membership is specified in advance, and discriminant analysis then determines the axes that explains the greatest variation between the groups (optimizes variance between groups divided by variance between groups). (More formally: any procedure for constructing a linear combination of variables that tends to have different values from organisms in different groups.) (Bookstein et al, 1985).

Alternative forms for Discriminant analysis : Canonical Discriminant analysis, CDA.