A second purpose of discriminant analysis is prediction--developing equations such that if you plug in the input values for a new observed individual or object, the equations would classify the individual or object into one of the target classes.
In modern predictive analytics, discriminant analysis is one of a large number of techniques that could be used in classification. The reason that so many classification techniques exist is that no method dominates the others across all problems and data. Typically, in a project, you might try a number of approaches and compare and contrast their performance on the data. A statistical method such as discriminant analysis could be one of these methods. In the event that the data meet the assumptions of discriminant analysis, it should perform well. As discriminant analysis is an equation-based method, the...