Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)
Frank Meinecke, Andreas Ziehe, Motoaki Kawanabe, Klaus-Robert Müller
When applying unsupervised learning techniques like ICA or tem(cid:173) poral decorrelation, a key question is whether the discovered pro(cid:173) jections are reliable. In other words: can we give error bars or can we assess the quality of our separation? We use resampling meth(cid:173) ods to tackle these questions and show experimentally that our proposed variance estimations are strongly correlated to the sepa(cid:173) ration error. We demonstrate that this reliability estimation can be used to choose the appropriate ICA-model, to enhance signifi(cid:173) cantly the separation performance, and, most important, to mark the components that have a actual physical meaning. Application to 49-channel-data from an magneto encephalography (MEG) ex(cid:173) periment underlines the usefulness of our approach.