NMF versus ICA for blind source separation

Blind source separation (BSS) is a problem of recovering source signals from signal mixtures without or very limited information about the sources and the mixing process. From literatures, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and independent component analysis (ICA) seem to be the mainstream techniques for solving the BSS problems. Even though the using of NMF and ICA for BSS is well studied, there is still a lack of works that compare the performances of these techniques. Moreover, the nonuniqueness property of NMF is rarely mentioned even though this property actually can make the reconstructed signals vary significantly, and thus introduces the difficulty on how to choose the representative reconstructions from several possible outcomes. In this paper, we compare the performances of NMF and ICA as BSS methods using some standard NMF and ICA algorithms, and point out the difficulty in choosing the representative reconstructions originated from the nonuniqueness property of NMF.