Second-order multidimensional ICA: Performance analysis

Independent component analysis (ICA) and blind source separation (BSS) deal with extracting a number of mutually independent elements from a set of observed linear mixtures. Motivated by various applications, this paper considers a more general and more flexible model: the sources can be partitioned into groups exhibiting dependence within a given group but independence between two different groups. We argue that this is tantamount to considering multidimensional components as opposed to the standard ICA case which is restricted to one-dimensional components. The core of the paper is devoted to the statistical analysis of the blind separation of multidimensional components based on second-order statistics, in a piecewise-stationary model. We develop the likelihood and the associated estimating equations for the Gaussian case. We obtain closed-form expressions for the Fisher information matrix and the Cramér-Rao bound of the de-mixing parameters, as well as the mean-square error (MSE) of the component estimates. The derived MSE is valid also for non-Gaussian data. Our analysis is verified through numerical experiments, and its performance is compared to classical ICA in various dependence scenarios, quantifying the gain in the accuracy of component recovery in presence of multidimensional components.