  This paper considers the classification of linear subspaces with mismatched
classifiers. In particular, we assume a model where one observes signals in the
presence of isotropic Gaussian noise and the distribution of the signals
conditioned on a given class is Gaussian with a zero mean and a low-rank
covariance matrix. We also assume that the classifier knows only a mismatched
version of the parameters of input distribution in lieu of the true parameters.
By constructing an asymptotic low-noise expansion of an upper bound to the
error probability of such a mismatched classifier, we provide sufficient
conditions for reliable classification in the low-noise regime that are able to
sharply predict the absence of a classification error floor. Such conditions
are a function of the geometry of the true signal distribution, the geometry of
the mismatched signal distributions as well as the interplay between such
geometries, namely, the principal angles and the overlap between the true and
the mismatched signal subspaces. Numerical results demonstrate that our
conditions for reliable classification can sharply predict the behavior of a
mismatched classifier both with synthetic data and in a motion segmentation and
a hand-written digit classification applications.
