Unique estimation in EEG analysis by the ordering ICA

Abstract

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a method for solving blind source separation problems. Because ICA only needs weak assumptions to estimate the unknown sources from only the observed signals, it is suitable for Electroencephalography (EEG) analysis. A serious disadvantage of the traditional ICA algorithms is that their results often fluctuate and do not converge to the unique and globally optimal solution at each run. It is because there are many local optima and permutation ambiguities. We have recently proposed a new ICA algorithm named the ordering ICA, a simple extension of Fast ICA. The ordering ICA is theoretically guaranteed to extract the independent components in the unique order and avoids the local optima in practice. This paper investigated the usefulness of the ordering ICA in EEG analysis. Experiments showed that the ordering ICA could give unique solutions for the signals with large non-Gaussianity, and the ease of parallelization could reduce computation time.