A new nonnegative matrix factorization for independent component analysis

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is known as a parts-based linear representation for nonnegative data. This method has been applied for blind source separation (BSS) when the sources are nonnegative. This paper presents a new NMF method for independent component analysis (ICA), which is useful for BSS without the nonnegativity constraint. Using this method, we transform the sources by their cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) and perform the nonparametric quantization to construct a nonnegative matrix where each entry represents the joint probability density of two transformed signals. The NMF procedure is accordingly realized to find the ICA demixing matrix. The independence between sources is maximized towards attaining the uniformity in the joint probability density. In the experiments on the separation of signal and music signals, we show the effectiveness of the proposed NMF-ICA compared to the infomax ICA and FastICA algorithms.