Hierarchical Extraction of Independent Subspaces of Unknown Dimensions

Abstract

Independent Subspace Analysis (ISA) is an extension of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) that aims to linearly transform a random vector such as to render groups of its components mutually independent. A recently proposed fixed-point algorithm is able to locally perform ISA if the sizes of the subspaces are known, however global convergence is a serious problem as the proposed cost function has additional local minima. We introduce an extension to this algorithm, based on the idea that the algorithm converges to a solution, in which subspaces that are members of the global minimum occur with a higher frequency. We show that this overcomes the algorithm’s limitations. Moreover, this idea allows a blind approach, where no a priori knowledge of subspace sizes is required.