Skip to content
Preprint

Foundations of Independent Component Analysis

Aug 2026 · 0 citations
Mathematics Computer Science

TL;DR

Under the strictest assumptions, it is shown that the independent sources are identifiable up to translation, permutation, scales and signs, and this even in the presence of additive Gaussian noise.

Abstract

We present the mathematical foundations of linear independent component analysis (ICA) models based on standard literature in a self-contained note. It is aimed at readers with a background in measure-theoretic probability theory. We first develop the theory of the characteristic functions of probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$, including their analyticity and the way in which they determine and characterise the distributions. We then focus on several identifiability results of ICA models with successively strengthened assumptions on the sources: from merely non-constant, to non-Gaussian, to Gaussian-free independent sources. Under the strictest assumptions, we show that the independent sources are identifiable up to translation, permutation, scales and signs, and this even in the presence of additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we present the online equivariant gradient descent ICA algorithm for recovering the independent sources from data, in the standard complete noiseless non-Gaussian ICA setting.

View source

Similar papers

#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Generalized Splines and Gaussian Processes

For finite-dimensional linear inverse problems where the variables are Gaussian, it is well-known that the minimum-mean-square error estimator takes the form of a regularized least-squares data fit. In this chapter, we show that this equivalence extends to a much broader infinite-dimensional setting where generalized s...

Michael Unser · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Asymptotics for Model Selection in Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis

The probabilistic formulation of principal component analysis promises statistically grounded solutions to the problem of selecting the number of principal components. However, developing tractable model selection methods is complicated by the fact that the probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) model exhibi...

Mathias Drton, Andrew McCormack, Daniel Windisch · 0 citations
Preprint Sep 2026

Riemannian Gradient Descent for Gaussian Mixture Models with unknown diagonal covariances

This paper investigates the numerical resolution of the Beurling-LASSO (BLASSO), a convex optimization framework that promotes sparsity in the space of measures. We consider its application to the estimation of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with an unknown number of components and unknown diagonal covariance matrices....

Romane Giard, Y. de Castro, R. Denis et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Sep 2026

On the parametric and semiparametric Fisher information matrix for non-zero mean stationary spherical invariant random processes

The classical Whittle formula provides a closed-form expression for the asymptotic Fisher information matrix (FIM) rate of multidimensional, real-valued, zero-mean, purely nondeterministic stationary Gaussian processes (GPs), expressed in terms of their parameterized spectra within a maximum-likelihood framework. Howev...

Jean-Pierre Delmas, Habti Abeida, Stefano Fortunati · 0 citations
Preprint Sep 2026

Principal component error in high-dimensional factor models

In a statistical factor model, principal components (or eigenvectors) of a sample covariance matrix serve as estimates of {\it principal directions}, the true drivers of co-movement of a collection of observed variables. We write the often substantial error in these estimates as a sum of two interpretable terms, which...

A. Bernstein, Lisa R. Goldberg, Nicholas Gunther et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Revisiting Shannon's Source Coding Theorem with Distributional Uncertainty under the Nonlinear Expectation Theory

In classical information theory, a source is modeled by a single, precisely known probability distribution. However, in the increasingly complex communication networks full of unanticipated, nonstationary, and heterogeneous random events, the assumption of precise and well-defined probability distributions to describe...

Wenxuan Lang, Shao-Shi Yang, Jianhua Zhang et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.