We consider the problem of recovering a common latent source with independent components from multiple views. This applies to settings in which a variable is measured with multiple experimental modalities, and where the goal is to synthesize the disparate measurements into a single unified representation. We consider the case that the observed views are a nonlinear mixing of component-wise corruptions of the sources. When the views are considered separately, this reduces to nonlinear Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for which it is provably impossible to undo the mixing. We present novel identifiability proofs that this is possible when the multiple views are considered jointly, showing that the mixing can theoretically be undone using function approximators such as deep neural networks. In contrast to known identifiability results for nonlinear ICA, we prove that independent latent sources with arbitrary mixing can be recovered as long as multiple, sufficiently different noisy views are available.
Abstract One of the challenges in data analysis is to distinguish between different sources of variability manifested in data. In this paper, we consider the case of multiple sensors measuring the same physical phenomenon, such that the properties of the physical phenomenon are manifested as a hidden common source of variability (which we would like to extract), while each sensor has its own sensor-specific effects (hidden variables which we would like to suppress); the relations between the measurements and the hidden variables are unknown. We present a data-driven method based on alternating products of diffusion operators and show that it extracts the common source of variability. Moreover, we show that it extracts the common source of variability in a multi-sensor experiment as if it were a standard manifold learning algorithm used to analyze a simple single-sensor experiment, in which the common source of variability is the only source of variability.