Least Absolute Value

Separation of uncorrelated stationary time series using autocovariance matrices

Blind source separation (BSS) is a signal processing tool, which is widely used in various fields. Examples include biomedical signal separation, brain imaging and economic time series applications. In BSS, one assumes that the observed $p$ time series are linear combinations of $p$ latent uncorrelated weakly stationary time series. The aim is then to find an estimate for an unmixing matrix, which transforms the observed time series back to uncorrelated latent time series. In SOBI (Second Order Blind Identification) joint diagonalization of the covariance matrix and autocovariance matrices with several lags is used to estimate the unmixing matrix. The rows of an unmixing matrix can be deriv…

ICA and stochastic volatility models

We consider multivariate time series where each component series is an unknown linear combination of latent mutually independent stationary time series. Multivariate financial time series have often periods of low volatility followed by periods of high volatility. This kind of time series have typically non-Gaussian stationary distributions, and therefore standard independent component analysis (ICA) tools such as fastICA can be used to extract independent component series even though they do not utilize any information on temporal dependence. In this paper we review some ICA methods used in the context of stochastic volatility models. We also suggest their modifications which use nonlinear…

Visual Parameter Selection for Spatial Blind Source Separation.

Analysis of spatial multivariate data, i.e., measurements at irregularly-spaced locations, is a challenging topic in visualization and statistics alike. Such data are inteGral to many domains, e.g., indicators of valuable minerals are measured for mine prospecting. Popular analysis methods, like PCA, often by design do not account for the spatial nature of the data. Thus they, together with their spatial variants, must be employed very carefully. Clearly, it is preferable to use methods that were specifically designed for such data, like spatial blind source separation (SBSS). However, SBSS requires two tuning parameters, which are themselves complex spatial objects. Setting these parameter…