On the Identifiability of Nonlinear ICA: Sparsity and Beyond

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zheng, Yujia, Ng, Ignavier, Zhang, Kun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Zheng, Yujia
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
author_facet Zheng, Yujia
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
contents Nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) aims to recover the underlying independent latent sources from their observable nonlinear mixtures. How to make the nonlinear ICA model identifiable up to certain trivial indeterminacies is a long-standing problem in unsupervised learning. Recent breakthroughs reformulate the standard independence assumption of sources as conditional independence given some auxiliary variables (e.g., class labels and/or domain/time indexes) as weak supervision or inductive bias. However, nonlinear ICA with unconditional priors cannot benefit from such developments. We explore an alternative path and consider only assumptions on the mixing process, such as Structural Sparsity. We show that under specific instantiations of such constraints, the independent latent sources can be identified from their nonlinear mixtures up to a permutation and a component-wise transformation, thus achieving nontrivial identifiability of nonlinear ICA without auxiliary variables. We provide estimation methods and validate the theoretical results experimentally. The results on image data suggest that our conditions may hold in a number of practical data generating processes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_07751
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Identifiability of Nonlinear ICA: Sparsity and Beyond
Zheng, Yujia
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) aims to recover the underlying independent latent sources from their observable nonlinear mixtures. How to make the nonlinear ICA model identifiable up to certain trivial indeterminacies is a long-standing problem in unsupervised learning. Recent breakthroughs reformulate the standard independence assumption of sources as conditional independence given some auxiliary variables (e.g., class labels and/or domain/time indexes) as weak supervision or inductive bias. However, nonlinear ICA with unconditional priors cannot benefit from such developments. We explore an alternative path and consider only assumptions on the mixing process, such as Structural Sparsity. We show that under specific instantiations of such constraints, the independent latent sources can be identified from their nonlinear mixtures up to a permutation and a component-wise transformation, thus achieving nontrivial identifiability of nonlinear ICA without auxiliary variables. We provide estimation methods and validate the theoretical results experimentally. The results on image data suggest that our conditions may hold in a number of practical data generating processes.
title On the Identifiability of Nonlinear ICA: Sparsity and Beyond
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07751