An improved method for independent component analysis with reference

Through incorporating a priori information available in some applications for independent component analysis (ICA) as the reference into the negentropy contrast function for FastICA, ICA with reference (ICA-R) or constrained ICA (cICA) is obtained as a constrained optimization problem. ICA-R achieves some advantages over earlier methods, whereas its computation load is somewhat high and its performance is strongly dependent on the threshold parameter. By alternately optimizing the negentropy contrast function for FastICA and the closeness measure for ICA-R, an improved method for ICA-R is proposed in this paper which can avoid the inherent drawbacks of ICA-R. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulation experiments.