Fast dependent components for fMRI analysis

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) can be used to find correlating projections of two datasets with co-occurring samples. Instead of correlation, we would typically want to find more general dependencies, measured by mutual information. Variants of CCA based on non-parametric estimation of mutual information have been proposed previously; they outperform traditional CCA for non-Gaussian data but require infeasible amounts of computation for already quite modest sample sizes. We introduce a novel variant that uses a semi parametric estimate leading to a considerably faster algorithm. We apply the method on searching for statistical dependencies between multi-sensory stimuli and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of brain activity- in contrast to using regression on either of them.