ICA based on Split Generalized Gaussian

Abstract

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a method for searching the linear transformation that minimizes the statistical dependence between its components. Most popular ICA methods use kurtosis as a metric of independence (non-Gaussianity) to maximize, such as FastICA and JADE. However, their assumption of fourth-order moment (kurtosis) may not always be satisfied in practice. One of the possible solution is to use third-order moment (skewness) instead of kurtosis, which was applied in ICASG and EcoICA. In this paper we present a competitive approach to ICA based on the Split Generalized Gaussian distribution (SGGD), which is well adapted to heavy-tailed as well as asymmetric data. Consequently, we obtain a method which works better than the classical approaches, in both cases: heavy tails and non-symmetric data.