Independent Component Analysis (ICA) - one of the basic tools in data analysis - aims to find a coordinate system in which the components of the data are independent. Most popular ICA methods use kurtosis as a metric of non-Gaussianity to maximize, such as FastICA and JADE. However, their assumption of fourth-order moment (kurtosis) may not always be satisfied in practice. One of the possible solution is to use third-order moment (skewness) instead of kurtosis, which was applied in @math and EcoICA. In this paper we present a competitive approach to ICA based on the Split Generalized Gaussian distribution (SGGD), which is well adapted to heavy-tailed as well as asymmetric data. Consequently, we obtain a method which works better than the classical approaches, in both cases: heavy tails and non-symmetric data.
An important measure of fitting independent components is given by negentropy @cite_59 . FastICA @cite_29 , one of the most popular implementations of ICA, uses this approach. Negentropy is based on the information-theoretic quantity of (differential) entropy. This concept leads to the mutual information which is the natural information-theoretic measure of the independence of random variables. Consequently, one can use it as the criterion for finding the ICA transformation @cite_22 @cite_14 . It can be shown that minimization of the mutual information is roughly equivalent to maximization of negentropy and it is easier to estimate since we do not need additional parameters.
@cite_29 @cite_14 @cite_22 @cite_59
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We analyze the estimation of information theoretic measures of continuous random variables such as: differential entropy, mutual information or Kullback-Leibler divergence. The objective of this paper is two-fold. First, we prove that the information theoretic measure estimates using the k-nearest-neighbor density estimation with fixed k converge almost surely, even though the k-nearest-neighbor density estimation with fixed k does not converge to its true measure. Second, we show that the information theoretic measure estimates do not converge for k growing linearly with the number of samples. Nevertheless, these nonconvergent estimates can be used for solving the two-sample problem and assessing if two random variables are independent. We show that the two-sample and independence tests based on these nonconvergent estimates compare favorably with the maximum mean discrepancy test and the Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion. This paper presents a new algorithm for the independent components analysis (ICA) problem based on an efficient entropy estimator. Like many previous methods, this algorithm directly minimizes the measure of departure from independence according to the estimated Kullback-Leibler divergence between the joint distribution and the product of the marginal distributions. We pair this approach with efficient entropy estimators from the statistics literature. In particular, the entropy estimator we use is consistent and exhibits rapid convergence. The algorithm based on this estimator is simple, computationally efficient, intuitively appealing, and outperforms other well known algorithms. In addition, the estimator's relative insensitivity to outliers translates into superior performance by our ICA algorithm on outlier tests. We present favorable comparisons to the Kernel ICA, FAST-ICA, JADE, and extended Infomax algorithms in extensive simulations. We also provide public domain source code for our algorithms. Independent component analysis (ICA) is a statistical method for transforming an observed multidimensional random vector into components that are statistically as independent from each other as possible. We use a combination of two different approaches for linear ICA: Comon's information theoretic approach and the projection pursuit approach. Using maximum entropy approximations of differential entropy, we introduce a family of new contrast functions for ICA. These contrast functions enable both the estimation of the whole decomposition by minimizing mutual information, and estimation of individual independent components as projection pursuit directions. The statistical properties of the estimators based on such contrast functions are analyzed under the assumption of the linear mixture model, and it is shown how to choose contrast functions that are robust and or of minimum variance. Finally, we introduce simple fixed-point algorithms for practical optimization of the contrast functions. Abstract The independent component analysis (ICA) of a random vector consists of searching for a linear transformation that minimizes the statistical dependence between its components. In order to define suitable search criteria, the expansion of mutual information is utilized as a function of cumulants of increasing orders. An efficient algorithm is proposed, which allows the computation of the ICA of a data matrix within a polynomial time. The concept of ICA may actually be seen as an extension of the principal component analysis (PCA), which can only impose independence up to the second order and, consequently, defines directions that are orthogonal. Potential applications of ICA include data analysis and compression, Bayesian detection, localization of sources, and blind identification and deconvolution.