Linear Multilayer ICA Using Adaptive PCA

Linear multilayer independent component analysis (LMICA) is an approximate algorithm for ICA. In LMICA, approximate independent components are efficiently estimated by optimizing only highly dependent pairs of signals when all the sources are super-Gaussian. In this paper, the nonlinear functions in LMICA are generalized, and a new method using adaptive PCA is proposed for the selection of pairs of highly dependent signals. In this method, at first, all the signals are sorted along the first principal axis of their higher-order correlation matrix. Then, the sorted signals are divided into two groups so that relatively highly correlated signals are collected in each group. Lastly, each of them is sorted recursively. This process is repeated until each group consists of only one or two signals. Because a well-known adaptive PCA algorithm named PAST is utilized for calculating the first principal axis, this method is quite simple and efficient. Some numerical experiments verify the effectiveness of LMICA with this improvement.