Explicit–implicit mapping approach to nonlinear blind separation of sparse nonnegative dependent sources from a single mixture: pure component extraction from nonlinear mixture mass spectra

The nonlinear, nonnegative single-mixture blind source separation (BSS) problem consists of decomposing observed nonlinearly mixed multicomponent signal into nonnegative dependent component (source) signals. The problem is difficult and is a special case of the underdetermined BSS problem. However, it is practically relevant for the contemporary metabolic profiling of biological samples when only one sample is available for acquiring mass spectra ; afterwards, the pure components are extracted. Herein, we present a method for the blind separation of nonnegative dependent sources from a single, nonlinear mixture. First, an explicit feature map is used to map a single mixture into a pseudo multi-mixture. Second, an empirical kernel map is used for implicit mapping of a pseudo multi-mixture into a high-dimensional reproducible kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Under sparse probabilistic conditions that were previously imposed on sources, the single-mixture nonlinear problem is converted into an equivalent linear, multiple-mixture problem that consists of the original sources and their higher order monomials. These monomials are suppressed by robust principal component analysis, hard-, soft- and trimmed thresholding. Sparseness constrained nonnegative matrix factorizations in RKHS yield sets of separated components. Afterwards, separated components are annotated with the pure components from the library using the maximal correlation criterion. The proposed method is depicted with a numerical example that is related to the extraction of 8 dependent components from 1 nonlinear mixture. The method is further demonstrated on 3 nonlinear chemical reactions of peptide synthesis in which 25, 19 and 28 dependent analytes are extracted from 1 nonlinear mixture mass spectra. The goal application of the proposed method is, in combination with other separation techniques, mass spectrometry-based non-targeted metabolic profiling, such as biomarker identification studies

Separating a Real-Life Nonlinear Image Mixture

When acquiring an image of a paper document, the image printed on the back page sometimes shows through. The mixture of the front- and back-page images thus obtained is markedly nonlinear, and thus constitutes a good real-life test case for nonlinear blind source separation. This paper addresses a difficult version of this problem, corresponding to the use of "onion skin" paper, which results in a relatively strong nonlinearity of the mixture, which becomes close to singular in the lighter regions of the images. The separation is achieved through the MISEP technique, which is an extension of the well known INFOMAX method. The separation results are assessed with objective quality measures. They show an improvement over the results obtained with linear separation, but have room for further improvement

An Extension of Slow Feature Analysis for Nonlinear Blind Source Separation

We present and test an extension of slow feature analysis as a novel approach to nonlinear blind source separation. The algorithm relies on temporal correlations and iteratively reconstructs a set of statistically independent sources from arbitrary nonlinear instantaneous mixtures. Simulations show that it is able to invert a complicated nonlinear mixture of two audio signals with a reliability of more than $90$\%. The algorithm is based on a mathematical analysis of slow feature analysis for the case of input data that are generated from statistically independent sources

Information Theoretical Estimators Toolbox

We present ITE (information theoretical estimators) a free and open source, multi-platform, Matlab/Octave toolbox that is capable of estimating many different variants of entropy, mutual information, divergence, association measures, cross quantities, and kernels on distributions. Thanks to its highly modular design, ITE supports additionally (i) the combinations of the estimation techniques, (ii) the easy construction and embedding of novel information theoretical estimators, and (iii) their immediate application in information theoretical optimization problems. ITE also includes a prototype application in a central problem class of signal processing, independent subspace analysis and its extensions.Comment: 5 pages; ITE toolbox: https://bitbucket.org/szzoli/ite