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It has previously been suggested that neurons with line and edge selectivities found in primary visual cortex of cats and monkeys form a sparse, distributed representation of natural scenes, and it has been reasoned that such responses should emerge from an unsupervised learning algorithm that attempts to find a factorial code of independent visual features. We show here that a new unsupervised learning algorithm based on information maximization, a nonlinear "infomax" network, when applied to an ensemble of natural scenes produces sets of visual filters that are localized and oriented. Some of these filters are Gabor-like and resemble those produced by the sparseness-maximization network. In addition, the outputs of these filters are as independent as possible, since this infomax network performs Independent Components Analysis or ICA, for sparse (super-gaussian) component distributions. We compare the resulting ICA filters and their associated basis functions, with other decorrelating filters produced by Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and zero-phase whitening filters (ZCA). The ICA filters have more sparsely distributed (kurtotic) outputs on natural scenes. They also resemble the receptive fields of simple cells in visual cortex, which suggests that these neurons form a natural, information-theoretic

Blind signal separation (BSS) and independent component analysis (ICA) are emerging techniques of array processing and data analysis, aiming at recovering unobserved signals or `sources' from observed mixtures (typically, the output of an array of sensors), exploiting only the assumption of mutual independence between the signals. The weakness of the assumptions makes it a powerful approach but requires to venture beyond familiar second order statistics. The objective of this paper is to review some of the approaches that have been recently developed to address this exciting problem, to show how they stem from basic principles and how they relate to each other.

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An extension of the infomax algorithm of Bell and Sejnowski (1995) is presented that is able blindly to separate mixed signals with sub- and supergaussian source distributions. This was achieved by using a simple type of learning rule first derived by Girolami (1997) by choosing negentropy as a projection pursuit index. Parameterized probability distributions that have sub- and supergaussian regimes were used to derive a general learning rule that preserves the simple architecture proposed by Bell and Sejnowski (1995), is optimized using the natural gradient by Amari (1998), and uses the stability analysis of Cardoso and Laheld (1996) to switch between sub- and supergaussian regimes. We demonstrate that the extended infomax algorithm is able to separate 20 sources with a variety of source distributions easily. Applied to high-dimensional data from electroencephalographic recordings, it is effective at separating artifacts such as eye blinks and line noise from weaker electrical signals that arise from sources in the brain.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a non-invasive measure of brain electrical activity recorded as changes in potential difference between points on the human scalp. Because of volume conduction through cerebrospinal fluid, skull and scalp, EEG data collected from any point on the scalp includes activity from processes occurring within a large brain volume.

We introduce the independent factor analysis (IFA) method for recovering independent hidden sources from their observed mixtures. IFA generalizes and unifies ordinary factor analysis (FA), principal component analysis (PCA), and independent component analysis (ICA), and can handle not only square noiseless mixing, but also the general case where the number of mixtures differs from the number of sources and the data are noisy. IFA is a two-step procedure. In the first step, the source densities, mixing matrix and noise covariance are estimated from the observed data by maximum likelihood. For this purpose we present an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, which performs unsupervised learning of an associated probabilistic model of the mixing situation. Each source in our model is described by a mixture of Gaussians, thus all the probabilistic calculations can be performed analytically. In the second step, the sources are reconstructed from the observed data by an optimal non-linear ...

This article considers high-order measures of independence for the independent component analysis problem and discusses the class of Jacobi algorithms for their optimization. Several implementations are discussed. We compare the proposed approaches with gradient-based techniques from the algorithmic point of view and also on a set of biomedical data.

Pervasive electroencephalographic (EEG) artifacts associated with blinks, eye-movements, muscle noise, cardiac signals, and line noise poses a major challenge for EEG interpretation and analysis. Here, we propose a generally applicable method for removing a wide variety of artifacts from EEG records based on an extended version of an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) algorithm [2, 12] for performing blind source separation on linear mixtures of independent source signals. Our results show that ICA can effectively separate and remove contamination from a wide variety of artifactual sources in EEG records with results comparing favorably to those obtained using Principal Component Analysis. 1 INTRODUCTION Since the landmark development of electroencephalography (EEG) in 1928 by Berger, scalp EEG has been used as a clinical tool for the diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases, and used as a non-invasive approach for research in the quantitative study of human neurophysiology. Ironic...

this article, we show that the same principle of independence maximization can explain the emergence of phase- and shift-invariant features, similar to those found in complex cells. This new kind of emergence is obtained by maximizing the independence between norms of projections on linear subspaces (instead of the independence of simple linear filter outputs). Thenorms of the projections on such "independent feature subspaces" then indicate the values of invariant features