Computations for LDA: Eigendecomposition While reading the book Elements of Statistical Learning p. 113, the author used eigendecomposition of the covariance matrix $\hat{\Sigma}_k =\mathbf{U}_k\mathbf{D}_k\mathbf{U}_k^T$ where $\mathbf{U}_k$ is $p \times p$ orthonormal, and $\mathbf{D}_k$ a diagonal matrix of positive eigenvalues $d_{kl}$
The formula for the quadratic function is as follows:
$$
\delta_k(x) = -\frac{1}{2}\log|\mathbf{\Sigma}_k|-\frac{1}{2}(x-\mu_k)^T\mathbf{\Sigma}^{-1}_k(x-\mu_k)+\log \pi_k
$$
Using the idea of eigendecomposition the $\delta_k(x)$ is redefind:
1)   $(x-\mu_k)^T\mathbf{\Sigma}^{-1}_k(x-\mu_k) = |\mathbf{U}_k^T(x-\mu_k)|^T\mathbf{D}_k^{-1}|\mathbf{U}_k^T(x-\mu_k)|$ 
2)   $\log|\hat{\mathbf{\Sigma}}| = \Sigma_l\log(d_{kl})$
Apparently, the computational steps for the LDA classifier can be implemented by starting with the following step:
$Sphere$ the data with respect to the commmon covariance estimate $\hat{\Sigma}$:
$X^*\leftarrow \mathbf{D}^{-\frac{1}{2}}\mathbf{U}^TX$, where $\hat{\mathbf{\Sigma}} = \mathbf{UDU}^T$. The common covariance estimate of $X^*$ will now be the identity.
I did not understand how the author came to this step and I don't know how to read the back arrow from $\mathbf{D}^{-\frac{1}{2}}\mathbf{U}^TX$. Anybody who has an idea where I should start or how I should tackle this? What do I have to imagine when reading $X^*$?
 A: What you might want to begin with here is the most general form of the discriminant function that is mentioned in the text: 
$$\delta_{k}(x) = log \ \mathbb{P} (G = k | X = x)$$
Under assumptions that $X | G = k \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu_{k},\,\Sigma)$ and $\mathbb{P} (G = k) = \pi_{k}$ (as introduced for linear discriminant analysis in the book) and after eliminating normalization constant from normal distribution density (because it is common for all discriminants) you obtain
$$ \delta_{k} (x) = - \frac{1}{2} (x - \mu_{k})^{T} \Sigma^{-1} (x - \mu_{k}) + log \ \pi_{k}$$
by Bayes theorem obviously. From here (after plugging in $\mu_{k}$, $\Sigma$ and $\pi_{k}$ estimates) you can either simplify again to obtain linear discriminant functions by removing common quadratic term (and arrive at 
$$ \delta_{k} (x) = x^{T} \hat{\Sigma}^{-1} \hat{\mu}_{k} - \frac{1}{2} \hat{\mu}_{k}^{T} \hat{\Sigma}^{-1} \hat{\mu}_{k} + log \ \hat{\pi}_{k}$$
which is eq. (4.10) in II edition of ESL) or you can use eigenvalue decomposition of $\hat{\Sigma}$ just like the authors used it for $\hat{\Sigma}_{k}$ (which you mention in 1) in your question):
$$ \begin{align} 
\delta_{k} (x) &= - \frac{1}{2} (\mathbf{U}^{T} (x - \hat{\mu}_{k}))^{T} \mathbf{D}^{-1} (\mathbf{U}^{T}(x - \hat{\mu}_{k})) + log \ \hat{\pi}_{k} \\
&= - \frac{1}{2} (\mathbf{U}^{T} (x - \hat{\mu}_{k}))^{T} \mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} (\mathbf{U}^{T}(x - \hat{\mu}_{k})) + log \ \hat{\pi}_{k} \\
&= - \frac{1}{2} (\mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T} (x - \hat{\mu}_{k}))^{T} (\mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T}(x - \hat{\mu}_{k})) + log \ \hat{\pi}_{k} \\
&=  - \frac{1}{2} \left \Vert \mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T} (x - \hat{\mu}_{k}) \right \Vert^{2}_{2} + log \ \hat{\pi}_{k}, 
\end{align} $$
where obviously $\hat{\Sigma} = \mathbf{U D U}^{T}$ is the eigendecomposition.
So we have an alternative form of the discriminant function. Now to my understanding that back arrow in $X^{\ast} \leftarrow \mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T} X$ means that the first step of this LDA implementation is to apply the sphering transform (linear map defined by $\mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T}$ matrix) to each observation (both in training set and to inputs at prediction time). That means we transform each row of the $N \times p$ data matrix $\mathbf{X}$ (matrix rows of which are training observations), so we obtain $\mathbf{X}^{\ast} = \mathbf{X} \mathbf{U} \mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}}$. Class labels of the observations do not change, so you can again consider class centroids - and it can be easily seen that the centroids in the transformed data are of form $\mathbf{D}^{- \frac{1}{2}} \mathbf{U}^{T} \hat{\mu}_{k}$. 
And not only that, it's rather trivial to derive covariance matrix of the transformed data $\mathbf{X}^{\ast}$ and see that it's indeed identity matrix. Hence the name: sphering or whitening the data, because separate features are now uncorrelated and have unit variance. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you might want to start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitening_transformation, if you haven't already.
Having said all that we can go back to our alternative form of discriminant above and see that the first term is indeed square distance between $k$ class centroid in the transformed data and transformed input observation $x$. Hence maximizing the discriminant amounts to classifying

to the closest class centroid in the transformed space, modulo
  the effect of the class prior probabilities $\pi_{k}$.

to quote the book. 
