A common problem encountered in such disciplines as statistics, data analysis, signal processing, and neural network research, is nding a suitable representation of multivariate data. For computational and conceptual simplicity, such a representation is often sought as a linear transformation of the original data. Well-known linear transformation methods include, for example, principal component analysis, factor analysis, and projection pursuit. A recently developed linear transformation method is independent component analysis (ICA), in which the desired representation is the one that minimizes the statistical dependence of the components of the representation. Such a representation seems to capture the essential structure of the data in many applications. In this paper, we survey the existing theory and methods for ICA. 1

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a statistical method for transforming an observed multidimensional random vector into components that are statistically as independent from each other as possible. In this paper, we use a combination of two different approaches for linear ICA: Comon's information-theoretic approach and the projection pursuit approach. Using maximum entropy approximations of differential entropy, we introduce a family of new contrast (objective) functions for ICA. These contrast functions enable both the estimation of the whole decomposition by minimizing mutual information, and estimation of individual independent components as projection pursuit directions. The statistical properties of the estimators based on such contrast functions are analyzed under the assumption of the linear mixture model, and it is shown how to choose contrast functions that are robust and/or of minimum variance. Finally, we introduce simple fixed-point algorithms for practical optimizatio...

A fundamental problem in neural network research, as well as in many other disciplines, is finding a suitable representation of multivariate data, i.e. random vectors. For reasons of computational and conceptual simplicity, the representation is often sought as a linear transformation of the original data. In other words, each component of the representation is a linear combination of the original variables. Well-known linear transformation methods include principal component analysis, factor analysis, and projection pursuit. Independent component analysis (ICA) is a recently developed method in which the goal is to find a linear representation of nongaussian data so that the components are statistically independent, or as independent as possible. Such a representation seems to capture the essential structure of the data in many applications, including feature extraction and signal separation. In this paper, we present the basic theory and applications of ICA, and our recent work on the subject.

Finding structures in vast multidimensional data sets, be they measurement data, statistics, or textual documents, is difficult and time-consuming. Interesting, novel relations between the data items may be hidden in the data. The selforganizing map (SOM) algorithm of Kohonen can be used to aid the exploration: the structures in the data sets can be illustrated on special map displays. In this work, the methodology of using SOMs for exploratory data analysis or data mining is reviewed and developed further. The properties of the maps are compared with the properties of related methods intended for visualizing highdimensional multivariate data sets. In a set of case studies the SOM algorithm is applied to analyzing electroencephalograms, to illustrating structures of the standard of living in the world, and to organizing full-text document collections. Measures are proposed for evaluating the quality of different types of maps in representing a given data set, and for measuring the robu...

Fisher's linear discriminant analysis is a valuable tool for multigroup classification. With a large number of predictors, one can nd a reduced number of discriminant coordinate functions that are "optimal" for separating the groups. With two such functions one can produce a classification map that partitions the reduced space into regions that are identified with group membership, and the decision boundaries are linear. This paper is about richer nonlinear classification schemes. Linear discriminant analysis is equivalent to multi-response linear regression using optimal scorings to represent the groups. We obtain nonparametric versions of discriminant analysis by replacing linear regression by any nonparametric regression method. In this way, any multi-response regression technique (such as MARS or neural networks) can be post-processed to improve their classification performence.

In this paper, we present an objective function formulation of the BCM theory of visual cortical plasticity that permits us to demonstrate the connection between the unsupervised BCM learning procedure and various statistical methods, in particular, that of Projection Pursuit. This formulation provides a general method for stability analysis of the fixed points of the theory and enables us to analyze the behavior and the evolution of the network under various visual rearing conditions. It also allows comparison with many existing unsupervised methods. This model has been shown successful in various applications such as phoneme and 3D object recognition. We thus have the striking and possibly highly significant result that a biological neuron is performing a sophisticated statistical procedure.

We show that different theories recently proposed for Independent Component Analysis (ICA) lead to the same iterative learning algorithm for blind separation of mixed independent sources. We review those theories and suggest that information theory can be used to unify several lines of research. Pearlmutter and Parra (1996) and Cardoso (1997) showed that the infomax approach of Bell and Sejnowski (1995) and the maximum likelihood estimation approach are equivalent. We show that negentropy maximization also has equivalent properties and therefore all three approaches yield the same learning rule for a fixed nonlinearity. Girolami and Fyfe (1997a) have shown that the nonlinear Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm of Karhunen and Joutsensalo (1994) and Oja (1997) can also be viewed from information-theoretic principles since it minimizes the sum of squares of the fourth-order marginal cumulants and therefore approximately minimizes the mutual information (Comon, 1994). Lambert (19...

In this paper, we identify two issues involved in developing an automated feature subset selection algorithm for unlabeled data: the need for finding the number of clusters in conjunction with feature selection, and the need for normalizing the bias of feature selection criteria with respect to dimension. We explore the feature selection problem and these issues through FSSEM (Feature Subset Selection using Expectation-Maximization (EM) clustering) and through two different performance criteria for evaluating candidate feature subsets: scatter separability and maximum likelihood. We present proofs on the dimensionality biases of these feature criteria, and present a cross-projection normalization scheme that can be applied to any criterion to ameliorate these biases. Our experiments show the need for feature selection, the need for addressing these two issues, and the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.

We derive a first-order approximation of the density of maximum entropy for a continuous 1-D random variable, given a number of simple constraints. This results in a density expansion which is somewhat similar to the classical polynomial density expansions by Gram-Charlier and Edgeworth. Using this approximation of density, an approximation of 1-D differential entropy is derived. The approximation of entropy is both more exact and more robust against outliers than the classical approximation based on the polynomial density expansions, without being computationally more expensive. The approximation has applications, for example, in independent component analysis and projection pursuit.

The grand tour and projection pursuit are two methods for exploring multivariate data. We show how to combine them into a dynamic graphical tool for exploratory data analysis, called a projection pursuit guided tour. This tool assists in clustering data when clusters are oddly shaped and in finding general low-dimensional structure in high dimensional, and in particular, sparse data. An example shows that the method, which is projection-based, can be quite powerful in situations which may cause methods based on kernel-smoothing grief. The projection pursuit guided tour is also useful for comparing and developing projection pursuit indices and illustrating some types of asymptotic results. 1 Introduction In this paper we show that two graphical methods for exploring high (say p) dimensional data, the grand tour (Asimov, 1985; Buja and Asimov, 1986), a dynamic tool, and projection pursuit (Kruskal, 1969; Friedman and Tukey, 1974; Huber, 1985), a static tool, naturally complement each o...