We give under weak assumptions a complete combinatorial characterization of identifiability for linear mixtures of finite alphabet sources, with unknown mixing weights and unknown source signals, but known alphabet. This is based on a detailed treatment of the case of a single linear mixture. Notably, our identifiability analysis applies also to the case of unknown number of sources. We provide sufficient and necessary conditions for identifiability and give a simple sufficient criterion together with an explicit construction to determine the weights and the source signals for deterministic data by taking advantage of the hierarchical structure within the possible mixture values. We show that the probability of identifiability is related to the distribution of a hitting time and converges exponentially fast to one when the underlying sources come from a discrete Markov process. Finally, we explore our theoretical results in a simulation study. This paper extends and clarifies the scope of scenarios for which blind source separation becomes meaningful.
 An algorithm for the identification of finite-impulse-response (FIR) system parameters from output measurements, for systems excited by discrete-alphabet inputs, is described. The approach taken is algebraic. It does not rely directly on the statistical properties of the measurements, but rather it essentially solves the nonlinear equations appearing in the problem by converting them to equivalent linear equations, using the discrete-alphabet property of the input signal. The proposed algorithm was tested by computer simulations and some of these simulations are illustrated. > This article addresses the problem of estimating a multivariate linear system from its output when the input is an unobservable sequence of random vectors with finite-alphabet distribution. By explicitly utilizing the finite-alphabet property, an estimation method is proposed under the traditional inverse filtering paradigm as a generalization of a univariate method that has been studied previously. Identifiability of multivariate systems by the proposed method is proved mathematically under very mild conditions that can be satisfied even if the input is nonstationary and has both cross-channel and serial statistical dependencies. Statistical super-efficiency in estimating both parametric and nonparametric systems is also established for an alphabet-based cost function.