Much of the motion capture data used in animations, commercials, and video games is carefully segmented into distinct motions either at the time of capture or by hand after the capture session. As we move toward collecting more and longer motion sequences, however, automatic segmentation techniques will become important for processing the results in a reasonable time frame.

We propose an independence criterion based on the eigenspectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. First, the empirical estimate is simpler than any other kernel dependence test, and requires no user-defined regularisation. Second, there is a clearly defined population quantity which the empirical estimate approaches in the large sample limit, with exponential convergence guaranteed between the two: this ensures that independence tests based on HSIC do not suffer from slow learning rates. Finally, we show in the context of independent component analysis (ICA) that the performance of HSIC is competitive with that of previously published kernel-based criteria, and of other recently published ICA methods.

this paper, we assume that we have n observations, each being a realization of the p- dimensional random variable x = (x 1 , . . . , x p ) with mean E(x) = = ( 1 , . . . , p ) and covariance matrix E{(x )(x = # pp . We denote such an observation matrix by X = i,j : 1 p, 1 n}. If i and # i = # (i,i) denote the mean and the standard deviation of the ith random variable, respectively, then we will often standardize the observations x i,j by (x i,j i )/ # i , where i = x i = 1/n j=1 x i,j , and # i = 1/n j=1 (x i,j x i )

We consider the noiseless linear independent component analysis problem, in the case where the hidden sources s are non-negative. We assume that the random variables s i s are well-grounded in that they have a non-vanishing pdf in the (positive) neighbourhood of zero. For an orthonormal rotation y = Wx of pre-whitened observations x = QAs, under certain reasonable conditions we show that y is a permutation of the s (apart from a scaling factor) if and only if y is non-negative with probability 1. We suggest that this may enable the construction of practical learning algorithms, particularly for sparse non-negative sources.

Methods for analysis of principal components in discrete data have existed for some time under various names such as grade of membership modelling, probabilistic latent semantic analysis, and genotype inference with admixture. In this paper we explore a number of extensions to the common theory, and present some application of these methods to some common statistical tasks. We show that these methods can be interpreted as a discrete version of ICA. We develop a hierarchical version yielding components at different levels of detail, and additional techniques for Gibbs sampling. We compare the algorithms on a text prediction task using support vector machines, and to information retrieval.

The classical receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex have been shown to emerge from the statistical properties of natural images by forcing the cell responses to be maximally sparse, i.e. significantly activated only rarely. Here, we show that this single principle of sparseness can also lead to emergence of topography (columnar organization) and complex cell properties as well. These are obtained by maximizing the sparsenesses of locally pooled energies, which correspond to complex cell outputs. Thus we obtain a highly parsimonious model of how these properties of the visual cortex are adapted to the characteristics of the natural input.

Abstract 1 Motivated in part by the hierarchical organization of the neocortex, a number of recently proposed algorithms have tried to learn hierarchical, or “deep, ” structure from unlabeled data. While several authors have formally or informally compared their algorithms to computations performed in visual area V1 (and the cochlea), little attempt has been made thus far to evaluate these algorithms in terms of their fidelity for mimicking computations at deeper levels in the cortical hierarchy. This thesis describes an unsupervised learning model that faithfully mimics certain properties of visual area V2. Specifically, we develop a sparse variant of the deep belief networks described by Hinton et al. (2006). We learn two layers of representation in the network, and demonstrate that the first layer, similar to prior work on sparse coding and ICA, results in localized, oriented, edge filters, similar to the gabor functions known to model simple cell receptive fields in area V1. Further, the second layer in our model encodes various combinations of the first layer responses in the data. Specifically, it picks up both collinear (“contour”) features as well as corners and junctions. More interestingly, in a quantitative comparison, the encoding of these more complex “corner ” features matches well with the results from Ito & Komatsu’s study of neural responses to angular stimuli in area V2 of the macaque. This suggests that our sparse variant of deep belief networks holds promise for modeling more higher-order features that are encoded in visual cortex. Conversely, one may also interpret the results reported here as suggestive that visual area V2 is performing computations on its input similar to those performed in (sparse) deep belief networks. This plausible relationship generates some intriguing hypotheses about V2 computations. 1 This thesis is an extended version of an earlier paper by Honglak Lee, Chaitanya Ekanadham, and Andrew Ng titled “Sparse deep belief net model for visual area V2.” 1

i Abstract This thesis is concerned with the problem of Blind Source Separation. Specifically we considerthe Independent Component Analysis (ICA) model in which a set of observations are modelled by xt = Ast: (1) where A is an unknown mixing matrix and st is a vector of hidden source components attime t. The ICA problem is to find the sources given only a set of observations. In chapter 1, the blind source separation problem is introduced. In chapter 2 the methodof Ensemble Learning is explained. Chapter 3 applies Ensemble Learning to the ICA model and chapter 4 assesses the use of Ensemble Learning for model selection.Chapters 5-7 apply the Ensemble Learning ICA algorithm to data sets from physics (a medical imaging data set consisting of images of a tooth), biology (data sets from cDNAmicro-arrays) and astrophysics (Planck image separation and galaxy spectra separation).

Separation of complex valued signals is a frequently arising problem in signal processing. For example, separation of convolutively mixed source signals involves computations on complex valued signals. In this article it is assumed that the original, complex valued source signals are mutually statistically independent, and the problem is solved by the independent component analysis (ICA) model. ICA is a statistical method for transforming an observed multidimensional random vector into components that are mutually as independent as possible. In this article, a fast xed-point type algorithm that is capable of separating complex valued, linearly mixed source signals is presented and its computational efficiency is shown by simulations. Also, the local consistency of the estimator given by the algorithm is proved.

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