Nonnegative least-correlated component analysis for separation of dependent sources by volume maximization

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2010 May;32(5):875-88. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2009.72.

Abstract

Although significant efforts have been made in developing nonnegative blind source separation techniques, accurate separation of positive yet dependent sources remains a challenging task. In this paper, a joint correlation function of multiple signals is proposed to reveal and confirm that the observations after nonnegative mixing would have higher joint correlation than the original unknown sources. Accordingly, a new nonnegative least-correlated component analysis (n/LCA) method is proposed to design the unmixing matrix by minimizing the joint correlation function among the estimated nonnegative sources. In addition to a closed-form solution for unmixing two mixtures of two sources, the general algorithm of n/LCA for the multisource case is developed based on an iterative volume maximization (IVM) principle and linear programming. The source identifiability and required conditions are discussed and proven. The proposed n/LCA algorithm, denoted by n/LCA-IVM, is evaluated with both simulation data and real biomedical data to demonstrate its superior performance over several existing benchmark methods.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Data Interpretation, Statistical
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods*
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated / methods*
  • Principal Component Analysis
  • Statistics as Topic
  • Subtraction Technique*