Blind separation of noisy multivariate data using second-order statistics

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-83).A second-order method for blind source separation of noisy instantaneous linear mixtures is presented and analyzed for the case where the signal order k and noise covariance GG-H are unknown. Only a data set X of dimension n > k and of sample size m is observed, where X = AP + GW. The quality of separation depends on source-observation ratio k/n, the degree of spectral diversity, and the second-order non-stationarity of the underlying sources. The algorithm estimates the Second-Order separation transform A, the signal Order, and Noise, and is therefore referred to as SOON. SOON iteratively estimates: 1) k using a scree metric, and 2) the values of AP, G, and W using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, where W is white noise and G is diagonal. The final step estimates A and the set of k underlying sources P using a variant of the joint diagonalization method, where P has k independent unit-variance elements. Tests using simulated Auto Regressive (AR) gaussian data show that SOON improves the quality of source separation in comparison to the standard second-order separation algorithms, i.e., Second-Order Blind Identification (SOBI) [3] and Second-Order Non-Stationary (SONS) blind identification [4]. The sensitivity in performance of SONS and SOON to several algorithmic parameters is also displayed in these experiments. To reduce sensitivities in the pre-whitening step of these algorithms, a heuristic is proposed by this thesis for whitening the data set; it is shown to improve separation performance. Additionally the application of blind source separation techniques to remote sensing data is discussed.(cont.) Analysis of remote sensing data collected by the AVIRIS multichannel visible/infrared imaging instrument shows that SOON reveals physically significant dynamics within the data not found by the traditional methods of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Noise Adjusted Principal Component Analysis (NAPCA).by Keith Herring.S.M

Multi-Detector Multi-Component spectral matching and applications for CMB data analysis

We present a new method for analyzing multi--detector maps containing contributions from several components. Our method, based on matching the data to a model in the spectral domain, permits to estimate jointly the spatial power spectra of the components and of the noise, as well as the mixing coefficients. It is of particular relevance for the analysis of millimeter--wave maps containing a contribution from CMB anisotropies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 Postscript figures, submitted to MNRA

Differential fast fixed-point algorithms for underdetermined instantaneous and convolutive partial blind source separation

This paper concerns underdetermined linear instantaneous and convolutive blind source separation (BSS), i.e., the case when the number of observed mixed signals is lower than the number of sources.We propose partial BSS methods, which separate supposedly nonstationary sources of interest (while keeping residual components for the other, supposedly stationary, "noise" sources). These methods are based on the general differential BSS concept that we introduced before. In the instantaneous case, the approach proposed in this paper consists of a differential extension of the FastICA method (which does not apply to underdetermined mixtures). In the convolutive case, we extend our recent time-domain fast fixed-point C-FICA algorithm to underdetermined mixtures. Both proposed approaches thus keep the attractive features of the FastICA and C-FICA methods. Our approaches are based on differential sphering processes, followed by the optimization of the differential nonnormalized kurtosis that we introduce in this paper. Experimental tests show that these differential algorithms are much more robust to noise sources than the standard FastICA and C-FICA algorithms.Comment: this paper describes our differential FastICA-like algorithms for linear instantaneous and convolutive underdetermined mixture

Joint Tensor Factorization and Outlying Slab Suppression with Applications

We consider factoring low-rank tensors in the presence of outlying slabs. This problem is important in practice, because data collected in many real-world applications, such as speech, fluorescence, and some social network data, fit this paradigm. Prior work tackles this problem by iteratively selecting a fixed number of slabs and fitting, a procedure which may not converge. We formulate this problem from a group-sparsity promoting point of view, and propose an alternating optimization framework to handle the corresponding $\ell_p$ ($0<p\leq 1$) minimization-based low-rank tensor factorization problem. The proposed algorithm features a similar per-iteration complexity as the plain trilinear alternating least squares (TALS) algorithm. Convergence of the proposed algorithm is also easy to analyze under the framework of alternating optimization and its variants. In addition, regularization and constraints can be easily incorporated to make use of \emph{a priori} information on the latent loading factors. Simulations and real data experiments on blind speech separation, fluorescence data analysis, and social network mining are used to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm

SZ and CMB reconstruction using Generalized Morphological Component Analysis

In the last decade, the study of cosmic microwave background (CMB) data has become one of the most powerful tools to study and understand the Universe. More precisely, measuring the CMB power spectrum leads to the estimation of most cosmological parameters. Nevertheless, accessing such precious physical information requires extracting several different astrophysical components from the data. Recovering those astrophysical sources (CMB, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich clusters, galactic dust) thus amounts to a component separation problem which has already led to an intense activity in the field of CMB studies. In this paper, we introduce a new sparsity-based component separation method coined Generalized Morphological Component Analysis (GMCA). The GMCA approach is formulated in a Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework. Numerical results show that this new source recovery technique performs well compared to state-of-the-art component separation methods already applied to CMB data.Comment: 11 pages - Statistical Methodology - Special Issue on Astrostatistics - in pres