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Projection pursuit (PP) and principal component analysis (PCA) projections derived from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery of central Colorado were compared. While PCA is a simple subset of the general class of PP algorithms, it cannot distinguish Gaussian from non-Gaussian distributions, since it maximizes projected variance. PP algorithms, which maximize higher-order statistics, can be used to find skew or multi-modal projections in order to reveal underlying class structure. These data projections have greater fidelity to underlying land-cover distributions. On sequestered test data, PP projections improved separation of individual categories from a few percent to as much as 24%. PP performance exceeded that of PCA for all but one of the 14 land-cover categories.
Bachmann et al. (Sat,) studied this question.