The performance of logistic discrimination on myocardial infarction data, in comparison with some other discriminant analysis methods.

The Imminent Myocardial Infarction study Rotterdam (IMIR), concerns patients who visit their general practitioners and have complaints suspected to be of cardiac origin. The study aims to develop a protocol for diagnosing myocardial infarction without laboratory assistance. We use the IMIR data, consisting of continuous and binary variables, to compare the diagnostic performance of logistic discrimination with some other discriminant analysis techniques. We discuss which characterizations of mixed data sets may give indications for an appropriate choice from among the alternative methods for discrimination.