Least Dependent Component Analysis Based on Mutual Information

We propose to use precise estimators of mutual information (MI) to find least dependent components in a linearly mixed signal. On the one hand this seems to lead to better blind source separation than with any other presently available algorithm. On the other hand it has the advantage, compared to other implementations of `independent' component analysis (ICA) some of which are based on crude approximations for MI, that the numerical values of the MI can be used for: (i) estimating residual dependencies between the output components; (ii) estimating the reliability of the output, by comparing the pairwise MIs with those of re-mixed components; (iii) clustering the output according to the residual interdependencies. For the MI estimator we use a recently proposed k-nearest neighbor based algorithm. For time sequences we combine this with delay embedding, in order to take into account non-trivial time correlations. After several tests with artificial data, we apply the resulting MILCA (Mutual Information based Least dependent Component Analysis) algorithm to a real-world dataset, the ECG of a pregnant woman. The software implementation of the MILCA algorithm is freely available at http://www.fz-juelich.de/nic/cs/softwareComment: 18 pages, 20 figures, Phys. Rev. E (in press

Independent EEG Sources Are Dipolar

Independent component analysis (ICA) and blind source separation (BSS) methods are increasingly used to separate individual brain and non-brain source signals mixed by volume conduction in electroencephalographic (EEG) and other electrophysiological recordings. We compared results of decomposing thirteen 71-channel human scalp EEG datasets by 22 ICA and BSS algorithms, assessing the pairwise mutual information (PMI) in scalp channel pairs, the remaining PMI in component pairs, the overall mutual information reduction (MIR) effected by each decomposition, and decomposition ‘dipolarity’ defined as the number of component scalp maps matching the projection of a single equivalent dipole with less than a given residual variance. The least well-performing algorithm was principal component analysis (PCA); best performing were AMICA and other likelihood/mutual information based ICA methods. Though these and other commonly-used decomposition methods returned many similar components, across 18 ICA/BSS algorithms mean dipolarity varied linearly with both MIR and with PMI remaining between the resulting component time courses, a result compatible with an interpretation of many maximally independent EEG components as being volume-conducted projections of partially-synchronous local cortical field activity within single compact cortical domains. To encourage further method comparisons, the data and software used to prepare the results have been made available (http://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/BSSComparison)

Information geometry of divergence functions

Measures of divergence between two points play a key role in many engineering problems. One such measure is a distance function, but there are many important measures which do not satisfy the properties of the distance. The Bregman divergence, Kullback-Leibler divergence and f-divergence are such measures. In the present article, we study the differential-geometrical structure of a manifold induced by a divergence function. It consists of a Riemannian metric, and a pair of dually coupled affine connections, which are studied in information geometry. The class of Bregman divergences are characterized by a dually flat structure, which is originated from the Legendre duality. A dually flat space admits a generalized Pythagorean theorem. The class of f-divergences, defined on a manifold of probability distributions, is characterized by information monotonicity, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence belongs to the intersection of both classes. The f-divergence always gives the -geometry, which consists of the Fisher information metric and a dual pair of š-connections. The -divergence is a special class of f-divergences. This is unique, sitting at the intersection of the f-divergence and Bregman divergence classes in a manifold of positive measures. The geometry derived from the Tsallis q-entropy and related divergences are also addressed

Equivariant nonstationary source separation

Most of source separation methods focus on stationary sources, so higher-order statistics is necessary for successful separation, unless sources are temporally correlated. For nonstationary sources, however, it was shown [Neural Networks 8 (1995) 4111 that source separation could be achieved by second-order decorrelation. In this paper, we consider the cost function proposed by Matsuoka et al. [Neural Networks 8 (1995) 4111 and derive natural gradient learning algorithms for both fully connected recurrent network and feedforward network. Since our algorithms employ the natural gradient method, they possess the equivariant property and find a steepest descent direction unlike the algorithm [Neural Networks 8 (1995) 411]. We also show that our algorithms are always locally stable, regardless of probability distributions of nonstationary sources. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.X1121sciescopu

Natural gradient learning for spatio-temporal decorrelation: Recurrent network

Spatio-temporal decorrelation is the task of eliminating correlations between associated signals in spatial domain as well as in time domain. In this paper. we present a simple but efficient adaptive algorithm for spatio-temporal decorrelation. For the task of spatio-temporal decorrelation. we consider a dynamic recurrent network and calculate the associated natural gradient for the minimization of all appropriate optimization function, The natural gradient based spatio-temporal decorrelation algorithm is applied to the task of blind deconvolution of linear single input multiple output (SIMO) system and its performance is compared to the spatio-temporal anti-Hebbian learning rule.114sciescopu

Flexible Independent Component Analysis

This paper addresses an independent component analysis (ICA) learning algorithm with flexible nonlinearity, so named as flexible ICA, that is able to separate instantaneous mixtures of sub- and super-Gaussian source signals. In the framework of natural Riemannian gradient, we employ the parameterized generalized Gaussian density model for hypothesized source distributions. The nonlinear function in the flexible ICA algorithm is controlled by the Gaussian exponent according to the estimated kurtosis of demixing filter output. Computer simulation results and performance comparison with existing methods are presented.1181120sciescopu