Gait recognition from motion capture data, as a pattern classification discipline, can be improved by the use of machine learning. This paper contributes to the state-of-the-art with a statistical approach for extracting robust gait features directly from raw data by a modification of Linear Discriminant Analysis with Maximum Margin Criterion... Experiments on the CMU MoCap database show that the suggested method outperforms thirteen relevant methods based on geometric features and a method to learn the features by a combination of Principal Component Analysis and Linear Discriminant Analysis. The methods are evaluated in terms of the distribution of biometric templates in respective feature spaces expressed in a number of class separability coefficients and classification metrics. Results also indicate a high portability of learned features, that means, we can learn what aspects of walk people generally differ in and extract those as general gait features. Recognizing people without needing group-specific features is convenient as particular people might not always provide annotated learning data. As a contribution to reproducible research, our evaluation framework and database have been made publicly available. This research makes motion capture technology directly applicable for human recognition. (read more)