Signal Recovery Using a Spiked Mixture Model

Journal Article (2025)
Author(s)

Paul Louis Delacour (TU Delft - Team Raf Van de Plas)

Sander Wahls (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie)

Jeffrey M. Spraggins (Vanderbilt University Medical Center, VanderBilt University)

Lukasz Migas (TU Delft - Team Raf Van de Plas)

Raf Van De Plas (VanderBilt University, TU Delft - Team Raf Van de Plas)

Research Group
Team Raf Van de Plas
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSP.2025.3593082
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2025
Language
English
Research Group
Team Raf Van de Plas
Volume number
73
Pages (from-to)
3748-3761
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

We introduce the spiked mixture model (SMM) to address the problem of estimating a set of signals from many randomly scaled and noisy observations. Subsequently, we design a novel expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to recover all parameters of the SMM. Numerical experiments show that in low signal-to-noise ratio regimes, and for data types where the SMM is relevant, SMM surpasses the more traditional Gaussian mixture model (GMM) in terms of signal recovery performance. The broad relevance of the SMM and its corresponding EM recovery algorithm is demonstrated by applying the technique to different data types. The first case study is a biomedical research application, utilizing an imaging mass spectrometry dataset to explore the molecular content of a rat brain tissue section at micrometer scale. The second case study demonstrates SMM performance in a computer vision application, segmenting a hyperspectral imaging dataset into underlying patterns. While the measurement modalities differ substantially, in both case studies SMM is shown to recover signals that were missed by traditional methods such as k-means clustering and GMM.