Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Klaus Nordhausen

Publications and source records attributed to Klaus Nordhausen.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Visual Parameter Selection for Spatial Blind Source Separation

Analysis of spatial multivariate data, i.e., measurements at irregularly-spaced locations, is a challenging topic in visualization and statistics alike. Such data are integral to many domains, e.g., indicators of valuable minerals are measured for mine prospecting. Popular analysis methods, like PCA, often by design do not account for the spatial nature of the data. Thus they, together with their spatial variants, must be employed very carefully. Clearly, it is preferable to use methods that were specifically designed for such data, like spatial blind source separation (SBSS). However, SBSS requires two tuning parameters, which are themselves complex spatial objects. Setting these parameters involves navigating two large and interdependent parameter spaces, while also taking into account prior knowledge of the physical reality represented by the data. To support analysts in this process, we developed a visual analytics prototype. We evaluated it with experts in visualization, SBSS, and geochemistry. Our evaluations show that our interactive prototype allows to define complex and realistic parameter settings efficiently, which was so far impractical. Settings identified by a non-expert led to remarkable and surprising insights for a domain expert. Therefore, this paper presents important first steps to enable the use of a promising analysis method for spatial multivariate data.

cs.HC↗

TBSSvis: Visual Analytics for Temporal Blind Source Separation

Temporal Blind Source Separation (TBSS) is used to obtain the true underlying processes from noisy temporal multivariate data, such as electrocardiograms. TBSS has similarities to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) as it separates the input data into univariate components and is applicable to suitable datasets from various domains, such as medicine, finance, or civil engineering. Despite TBSS's broad applicability, the involved tasks are not well supported in current tools, which offer only text-based interactions and single static images. Analysts are limited in analyzing and comparing obtained results, which consist of diverse data such as matrices and sets of time series. Additionally, parameter settings have a big impact on separation performance, but as a consequence of improper tooling, analysts currently do not consider the whole parameter space. We propose to solve these problems by applying visual analytics (VA) principles. Our primary contribution is a design study for TBSS, which so far has not been explored by the visualization community. We developed a task abstraction and visualization design in a user-centered design process. Task-specific assembling of well-established visualization techniques and algorithms to gain insights in the TBSS processes is our secondary contribution. We present TBSSvis, an interactive web-based VA prototype, which we evaluated extensively in two interviews with five TBSS experts. Feedback and observations from these interviews show that TBSSvis supports the actual workflow and combination of interactive visualizations that facilitate the tasks involved in analyzing TBSS results.

cs.HC↗

Kurtosis-based projection pursuit for matrix-valued data

We develop projection pursuit for data that admit a natural representation in matrix form. For projection indices, we propose extensions of the classical kurtosis and Mardia's multivariate kurtosis. The first index estimates projections for both sides of the matrices simultaneously, while the second index finds the two projections separately. Both indices are shown to recover the optimally separating projection for two-group Gaussian mixtures in the full absence of any label information. We further establish the strong consistency of the corresponding sample estimators. Simulations and a real data example on hand-written postal code data are used to demonstrate the method.

math.ST↗

Spatial Blind Source Separation in the Presence of a Drift

Multivariate measurements taken at different spatial locations occur frequently in practice. Proper analysis of such data needs to consider not only dependencies on-sight but also dependencies in and in-between variables as a function of spatial separation. Spatial Blind Source Separation (SBSS) is a recently developed unsupervised statistical tool that deals with such data by assuming that the observable data is formed by a linear latent variable model. In SBSS the latent variable is assumed to be constituted by weakly stationary random fields which are uncorrelated. Such a model is appealing as further analysis can be carried out on the marginal distributions of the latent variables, interpretations are straightforward as the model is assumed to be linear, and not all components of the latent field might be of interest which acts as a form of dimension reduction. The weakly stationarity assumption of SBSS implies that the mean of the data is constant for all sample locations, which might be too restricting in practical applications. Therefore, an adaptation of SBSS that uses scatter matrices based on differences was recently suggested in the literature. In our contribution we formalize these ideas, suggest an adapted SBSS method and show its usefulness on synthetic and real data.

stat.ME↗

Test of the Latent Dimension of a Spatial Blind Source Separation Model

We assume a spatial blind source separation model in which the observed multivariate spatial data is a linear mixture of latent spatially uncorrelated Gaussian random fields containing a number of pure white noise components. We propose a test on the number of white noise components and obtain the asymptotic distribution of its statistic for a general domain. We also demonstrate how computations can be facilitated in the case of gridded observation locations. Based on this test, we obtain a consistent estimator of the true dimension. Simulation studies and an environmental application demonstrate that our test is at least comparable to and often outperforms bootstrap-based techniques, which are also introduced in this paper.

math.ST↗

Blind source separation for non-stationary random fields

Regional data analysis is concerned with the analysis and modeling of measurements that are spatially separated by specifically accounting for typical features of such data. Namely, measurements in close proximity tend to be more similar than the ones further separated. This might hold also true for cross-dependencies when multivariate spatial data is considered. Often, scientists are interested in linear transformations of such data which are easy to interpret and might be used as dimension reduction. Recently, for that purpose spatial blind source separation (SBSS) was introduced which assumes that the observed data are formed by a linear mixture of uncorrelated, weakly stationary random fields. However, in practical applications, it is well-known that when the spatial domain increases in size the weak stationarity assumptions can be violated in the sense that the second order dependency is varying over the domain which leads to non-stationary analysis. In our work we extend the SBSS model to adjust for these stationarity violations, present three novel estimators and establish the identifiability and affine equivariance property of the unmixing matrix functionals defining these estimators. In an extensive simulation study, we investigate the performance of our estimators and also show their use in the analysis of a geochemical dataset which is derived from the GEMAS geochemical mapping project.

stat.ME↗

Stationary subspace analysis based on second-order statistics

In stationary subspace analysis (SSA) one assumes that the observable p-variate time series is a linear mixture of a k-variate nonstationary time series and a (p-k)-variate stationary time series. The aim is then to estimate the unmixing matrix which transforms the observed multivariate time series onto stationary and nonstationary components. In the classical approach multivariate data are projected onto stationary and nonstationary subspaces by minimizing a Kullback-Leibler divergence between Gaussian distributions, and the method only detects nonstationarities in the first two moments. In this paper we consider SSA in a more general multivariate time series setting and propose SSA methods which are able to detect nonstationarities in mean, variance and autocorrelation, or in all of them. Simulation studies illustrate the performances of proposed methods, and it is shown that especially the method that detects all three types of nonstationarities performs well in various time series settings. The paper is concluded with an illustrative example.

stat.ME↗

Large-Sample Properties of Blind Estimation of the Linear Discriminant Using Projection Pursuit

We study the estimation of the linear discriminant with projection pursuit, a method that is blind in the sense that it does not use the class labels in the estimation. Our viewpoint is asymptotic and, as our main contribution, we derive central limit theorems for estimators based on three different projection indices, skewness, kurtosis and their convex combination. The results show that in each case the limiting covariance matrix is proportional to that of linear discriminant analysis (LDA), an unblind estimator of the discriminant. An extensive comparative study between the asymptotic variances reveals that projection pursuit is able to achieve efficiency equal to LDA when the groups are arbitrarily well-separated and their sizes are reasonably balanced. We conclude with a real data example and a simulation study investigating the validity of the obtained asymptotic formulas for finite samples.

math.ST↗

Non-Gaussian component analysis: testing the dimension of the signal subspace

Dimension reduction is a common strategy in multivariate data analysis which seeks a subspace which contains all interesting features needed for the subsequent analysis. Non-Gaussian component analysis attempts for this purpose to divide the data into a non-Gaussian part, the signal, and a Gaussian part, the noise. We will show that the simultaneous use of two scatter functionals can be used for this purpose and suggest a bootstrap test to test the dimension of the non-Gaussian subspace. Sequential application of the test can then for example be used to estimate the signal dimension.

stat.ME↗

Sliced Inverse Regression for Spatial Data

Sliced inverse regression is one of the most popular sufficient dimension reduction methods. Originally, it was designed for independent and identically distributed data and recently extend to the case of serially and spatially dependent data. In this work we extend it to the case of spatially dependent data where the response might depend also on neighbouring covariates when the observations are taken on a grid-like structure as it is often the case in econometric spatial regression applications. We suggest guidelines on how to decide upon the dimension of the subspace of interest and also which spatial lag might be of interest when modeling the response. These guidelines are supported by a conducted simulation study.

stat.ME↗

Independent Component Analysis for Compositional Data

Compositional data represent a specific family of multivariate data, where the information of interest is contained in the ratios between parts rather than in absolute values of single parts. The analysis of such specific data is challenging as the application of standard multivariate analysis tools on the raw observations can lead to spurious results. Hence, it is appropriate to apply certain transformations prior further analysis. One popular multivariate data analysis tool is independent component analysis. Independent component analysis aims to find statistically independent components in the data and as such might be seen as an extension to principal component analysis. In this paper we examine an approach of how to apply independent component analysis on compositional data by respecting the nature of the former and demonstrate the usefulness of this procedure on a metabolomic data set.

stat.ME↗

On Cokriging, Neural Networks, and Spatial Blind Source Separation for Multivariate Spatial Prediction

Multivariate measurements taken at irregularly sampled locations are a common form of data, for example in geochemical analysis of soil. In practical considerations predictions of these measurements at unobserved locations are of great interest. For standard multivariate spatial prediction methods it is mandatory to not only model spatial dependencies but also cross-dependencies which makes it a demanding task. Recently, a blind source separation approach for spatial data was suggested. When using this spatial blind source separation method prior the actual spatial prediction, modelling of spatial cross-dependencies is avoided, which in turn simplifies the spatial prediction task significantly. In this paper we investigate the use of spatial blind source separation as a pre-processing tool for spatial prediction and compare it with predictions from Cokriging and neural networks in an extensive simulation study as well as a geochemical dataset.

eess.SP↗

Notion of information and independent component analysis

Partial orderings and measures of information for continuous univariate random variables with special roles of Gaussian and uniform distributions are discussed. The information measures and measures of non-Gaussianity including third and fourth cumulants are generally used as projection indices in the projection pursuit approach for the independent component analysis. The connections between information, non-Gaussianity and statistical independence in the context of independent component analysis is discussed in detail.

math.ST↗

Fast tensorial JADE

In this work, we propose a novel method for tensorial independent component analysis. Our approach is based on TJADE and $ k $-JADE, two recently proposed generalizations of the classical JADE algorithm. Our novel method achieves the consistency and the limiting distribution of TJADE under mild assumptions, and at the same time offers notable improvement in computational speed. Detailed mathematical proofs of the statistical properties of our method are given and, as a special case, a conjecture on the properties of $ k $-JADE is resolved. Simulations and timing comparisons demonstrate remarkable gain in speed. Moreover, the desired efficiency is obtained approximately for finite samples. The method is applied successfully to large-scale video data, for which neither TJADE nor $ k $-JADE is feasible. Finally, an experimental procedure is proposed to select the values of a set of tuning parameters.

math.ST↗

Spatial Blind Source Separation

Recently a blind source separation model was suggested for spatial data together with an estimator based on the simultaneous diagonalisation of two scatter matrices. The asymptotic properties of this estimator are derived here and a new estimator, based on the joint diagonalisation of more than two scatter matrices, is proposed. The asymptotic properties and merits of the novel estimator are verified in simulation studies. A real data example illustrates the method.

math.ST↗

Extracting conditionally heteroscedastic components using ICA

In the independent component model, the multivariate data is assumed to be a mixture of mutually independent latent components, and in independent component analysis (ICA) the aim is to estimate these latent components. In this paper we study an ICA method which combines the use of linear and quadratic autocorrelations in order to enable efficient estimation of various kinds of stationary time series. Statistical properties of the estimator are studied by finding its limiting distribution under general conditions, and the asymptotic variances are derived in the case of ARMA-GARCH model. We use the asymptotic results and a finite sample simulation study to compare different choices of a weight coefficient. As it is often of interest to identify all those components which exhibit stochastic volatility features we also suggest a test statistic for this problem. We also show that a slightly modified version of principal volatility components (PVC) can be seen as an ICA method. Finally, we apply the estimators in analyzing a data set which consists of time series of exchange rates of seven currencies to US dollar. Supplementary material including proofs of the theorems is available online.

math.ST↗

Sliced Average Variance Estimation for Multivariate Time Series

Supervised dimension reduction for time series is challenging as there may be temporal dependence between the response $y$ and the predictors $\boldsymbol x$. Recently a time series version of sliced inverse regression, TSIR, was suggested, which applies approximate joint diagonalization of several supervised lagged covariance matrices to consider the temporal nature of the data. In this paper we develop this concept further and propose a time series version of sliced average variance estimation, TSAVE. As both TSIR and TSAVE have their own advantages and disadvantages, we consider furthermore a hybrid version of TSIR and TSAVE. Based on examples and simulations we demonstrate and evaluate the differences between the three methods and show also that they are superior to apply their iid counterparts to when also using lagged values of the explaining variables as predictors.

stat.ME↗

Determining the signal dimension in second order source separation

While an important topic in practice, the estimation of the number of non-noise components in blind source separation has received little attention in the literature. Recently, two bootstrap-based techniques for estimating the dimension were proposed, and although very efficient, they suffer from the long computation times caused by the resampling. We approach the problem from a large sample viewpoint and develop an asymptotic test for the true dimension. Our test statistic based on second-order temporal information has a very simple limiting distribution under the null hypothesis and requires no parameters to estimate. Comparisons to the resampling-based estimates show that the asymptotic test provides comparable error rates with significantly faster computation time. An application to sound recording data is used to illustrate the method in practice.

math.ST↗