Factor Analysis of Dynamic PET Images: Beyond Gaussian Noise.

Factor analysis has proven to be a relevant tool for extracting tissue time-activity curves (TACs) in dynamic PET images, since it allows for an unsupervised analysis of the data. Reliable and interpretable results are possible only if it is considered with respect to suitable noise statistics. However, the noise in reconstructed dynamic PET images is very difficult to characterize, despite the Poissonian nature of the count rates. Rather than explicitly modeling the noise distribution, this paper proposes to study the relevance of several divergence measures to be used within a factor analysis framework. To this end, the ß -divergence, widely used in other applicative domains, is considered to design the data-fitting term involved in three different factor models. The performances of the resulting algorithms are evaluated for different values of ß , in a range covering Gaussian, Poissonian, and Gamma-distributed noises. The results obtained on two different types of synthetic images and one real image show the interest of applying non-standard values of ß to improve the factor analysis.

Nonlinear Hyperspectral Unmixing With Robust Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

We introduce a robust mixing model to describe hyperspectral data resulting from the mixture of several pure spectral signatures. The new model extends the commonly used linear mixing model by introducing an additional term accounting for possible nonlinear effects, that are treated as sparsely distributed additive outliers. With the standard nonnegativity and sum-to-one constraints inherent to spectral unmixing, our model leads to a new form of robust nonnegative matrix factorization with a group-sparse outlier term. The factorization is posed as an optimization problem, which is addressed with a block-coordinate descent algorithm involving majorization-minimization updates. Simulation results obtained on synthetic and real data show that the proposed strategy competes with the state-of-the-art linear and nonlinear unmixing methods.

Automatic relevance determination in nonnegative matrix factorization with the ß-divergence.

This paper addresses the estimation of the latent dimensionality in nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with the ß-divergence. The ß-divergence is a family of cost functions that includes the squared euclidean distance, Kullback-Leibler (KL) and Itakura-Saito (IS) divergences as special cases. Learning the model order is important as it is necessary to strike the right balance between data fidelity and overfitting. We propose a Bayesian model based on automatic relevance determination (ARD) in which the columns of the dictionary matrix and the rows of the activation matrix are tied together through a common scale parameter in their prior. A family of majorization-minimization (MM) algorithms is proposed for maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation. A subset of scale parameters is driven to a small lower bound in the course of inference, with the effect of pruning the corresponding spurious components. We demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of our algorithms by performing extensive experiments on synthetic data, the swimmer dataset, a music decomposition example, and a stock price prediction task.

Nonnegative matrix factorization with the Itakura-Saito divergence: with application to music analysis.

This letter presents theoretical, algorithmic, and experimental results about nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with the Itakura-Saito (IS) divergence. We describe how IS-NMF is underlaid by a well-defined statistical model of superimposed gaussian components and is equivalent to maximum likelihood estimation of variance parameters. This setting can accommodate regularization constraints on the factors through Bayesian priors. In particular, inverse-gamma and gamma Markov chain priors are considered in this work. Estimation can be carried out using a space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE) algorithm; this leads to a novel type of NMF algorithm, whose convergence to a stationary point of the IS cost function is guaranteed. We also discuss the links between the IS divergence and other cost functions used in NMF, in particular, the Euclidean distance and the generalized Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. As such, we describe how IS-NMF can also be performed using a gradient multiplicative algorithm (a standard algorithm structure in NMF) whose convergence is observed in practice, though not proven. Finally, we report a furnished experimental comparative study of Euclidean-NMF, KL-NMF, and IS-NMF algorithms applied to the power spectrogram of a short piano sequence recorded in real conditions, with various initializations and model orders. Then we show how IS-NMF can successfully be employed for denoising and upmix (mono to stereo conversion) of an original piece of early jazz music. These experiments indicate that IS-NMF correctly captures the semantics of audio and is better suited to the representation of music signals than NMF with the usual Euclidean and KL costs.

Blind separation of linear instantaneous mixtures of nonstationary surface myoelectric signals.

Electromyographic (EMG) recordings detected over the skin may be mixtures of signals generated by different active muscles due to the phenomena related to volume conduction. Separation of the sources is necessary when single muscle activity has to be detected. Signals generated by different muscles may be considered uncorrelated but in general overlap in time and frequency. Under certain assumptions, mixtures of surface EMG signals can be considered as linear instantaneous but no a priori information about the mixing matrix is available when different muscles are active. In this study, we applied blind source separation (BSS) methods to separate the signals generated by two active muscles during a force-varying task. As the signals are non stationary, an algorithm based on spatial time-frequency distributions was applied on simulated and experimental EMG signals. The experimental signals were collected from the flexor carpi radialis and the pronator teres muscles which could be activated selectively for wrist flexion and rotation, respectively. From the simulations, correlation coefficients between the reference and reconstructed sources were higher than 0.85 for signals largely overlapping both in time and frequency and for signal-to-noise ratios as low as 5 dB. The Choi-Williams and Bessel kernels, in this case, performed better than the Wigner-Ville one. Moreover, the selection of time-frequency points for the procedure of joint diagonalization used in the BSS algorithm significantly influenced the results. For the experimental signals, the interference of the other source in each reconstructed source was significantly attenuated by the application of the BSS method. The ratio between root-mean-square values of the signals from the two sources detected over one of the muscles increased from (mean +/- standard deviation) 2.33 +/- 1.04 to 4.51 +/- 1.37 and from 1.55 +/- 0.46 to 2.72 +/- 0.65 for wrist flexion and rotation, respectively. This increment was statistically significant. It was concluded that the BSS approach applied is promising for the separation of surface EMG signals, with applications ranging from muscle assessment to detection of muscle activation intervals, and to the control of myoelectric prostheses.