Aapo Hyvärinen

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What is Independent Component Analysis?

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a statistical and computational technique for revealing hidden factors that underlie sets of random variables, measurements, or signals.

ICA defines a generative model for the observed multivariate data, which is typically given as a large database of samples. In the model, the data variables are assumed to be linear mixtures of some unknown latent variables, and the mixing system is also unknown. The latent variables are assumed nongaussian and mutually independent, and they are called the independent components of the observed data. These independent components, also called sources or factors, can be found by ICA.

ICA is superficially related to principal component analysis and factor analysis. ICA is a much more powerful technique, however, capable of finding the underlying factors or sources when these classic methods fail completely.

The data analyzed by ICA could originate from many different kinds of application fields, including digital images, document databases, economic indicators and psychometric measurements. In many cases, the measurements are given as a set of parallel signals or time series; the term blind source separation is used to characterize this problem. Typical examples are mixtures of simultaneous speech signals that have been picked up by several microphones, brain waves recorded by multiple sensors, interfering radio signals arriving at a mobile phone, or parallel time series obtained from some industrial process.

More information on ICA can be found under the following links:

Short explanation    Tutorial paper (also in Japanese)    

and in particular:

Independent Component Analysis: The Book    

To actually do ICA on your data, you may want to use the

FastICA MATLAB package