TY - JOUR A1 - Harmeling, Stefan A1 - Meinecke, Frank C. A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Injecting noise for analysing the stability of ICA components N2 - Usually, noise is considered to be destructive. We present a new method that constructively injects noise to assess the reliability and the grouping structure of empirical ICA component estimates. Our method can be viewed as a Monte-Carlo-style approximation of the curvature of some performance measure at the solution. Simulations show that the true root-mean-squared angle distances between the real sources and the source estimates can be approximated well by our method. In a toy experiment, we see that we are also able to reveal the underlying grouping structure of the extracted ICA components. Furthermore, an experiment with fetal ECG data demonstrates that our approach is useful for exploratory data analysis of real-world data. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0165-1684 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Blankertz, Benjamin A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert A1 - Curio, Gabriel A1 - Vaughan, Theresa M. A1 - Schalk, Gerwin A1 - Wolpaw, Jonathan R. A1 - Schlogl, Alois A1 - Neuper, Christa A1 - Pfurtscheller, Gert A1 - Hinterberger, Thilo A1 - Schroder, Michael A1 - Birbaumer, Niels T1 - The BCI competition 2003 : Progress and perspectives in detection and discrimination of EEG single trials N2 - Interest in developing a new method of man-to-machine communication-a brain-computer interface (BCI)-has grown steadily over the past few decades. BCIs create a new communication channel between the brain and an output device by bypassing conventional motor output pathways of nerves and muscles. These systems use signals recorded from the scalp, the surface of the cortex, or from inside the brain to enable users to control a variety of applications including simple word-processing software and orthotics. BCI technology could therefore provide a new communication and control option for individuals who cannot otherwise express their wishes to the outside world. Signal processing and classification methods are essential tools in the development of improved BCI technology. We organized the BCI Competition 2003 to evaluate the current state of the art of these tools. Four laboratories well versed in EEG-based BCI research provided six data sets in a documented format. We made these data sets (i.e., labeled training sets and unlabeled test sets) and their descriptions available on the Internet. The goal in the competition was to maximize the performance measure for the test labels. Researchers worldwide tested their algorithms and competed for the best classification results. This paper describes the six data sets and the results and function of the most successful algorithms Y1 - 2004 SN - 0018-9294 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dornhege, Guido A1 - Blankertz, Benjamin A1 - Curio, Gabriel A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Boosting bit rates in noninvasive EEG single-trial classifications by feature combination and multiclass paradigms N2 - Noninvasive electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings provide for easy and safe access to human neocortical processes which can be exploited for a brain-computer interface (BCI). At present, however, the use of BCIs is severely limited by low bit-transfer rates. We systematically analyze and develop two recent concepts, both capable of enhancing the information gain from multichannel scalp EEG recordings: 1) the combination of classifiers, each specifically tailored for different physiological phenomena, e.g., slow cortical potential shifts, such as the premovement Bereitschaftspotential or differences in spatio-spectral distributions of brain activity (i.e., focal event-related desynchronizations) and 2) behavioral paradigms inducing the subjects to generate one out of several brain states (multiclass approach) which all bare a distinctive spatio-temporal signature well discriminable in the standard scalp EEG. We derive information-theoretic predictions and demonstrate their relevance in experimental data. We will show that a suitably arranged interaction between these concepts can significantly boost BCI performances Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Laub, Julian A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Feature discovery in non-metric pairwise data N2 - Pairwise proximity data, given as similarity or dissimilarity matrix, can violate metricity. This occurs either due to noise, fallible estimates, or due to intrinsic non-metric features such as they arise from human judgments. So far the problem of non-metric pairwise data has been tackled by essentially omitting the negative eigenvalues or shifting the spectrum of the associated (pseudo) covariance matrix for a subsequent embedding. However, little attention has been paid to the negative part of the spectrum itself. In particular no answer was given to whether the directions associated to the negative eigenvalues would at all code variance other than noise related. We show by a simple, exploratory analysis that the negative eigenvalues can code for relevant structure in the data, thus leading to the discovery of new features, which were lost by conventional data analysis techniques. The information hidden in the negative eigenvalue part of the spectrum is illustrated and discussed for three data sets, namely USPS handwritten digits, text-mining and data from cognitive psychology Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ziehe, Andreas A1 - Laskov, Pavel A1 - Nolte, G A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - A fast algorithm for joint diagonalization with non-orthogonal transformations and its application to blind source separation N2 - A new efficient algorithm is presented for joint diagonalization of several matrices. The algorithm is based on the Frobenius-norm formulation of the joint diagonalization problem, and addresses diagonalization with a general, non- orthogonal transformation. The iterative scheme of the algorithm is based on a multiplicative update which ensures the invertibility of the diagonalizer. The algorithm's efficiency stems from the special approximation of the cost function resulting in a sparse, block-diagonal Hessian to be used in the computation of the quasi-Newton update step. Extensive numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the algorithm and provide a comparison to other leading diagonalization methods. The results of such comparison demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is a viable alternative to existing state-of-the-art joint diagonalization algorithms. The practical use of our algorithm is shown for blind source separation problems Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Meinecke, Frank C. A1 - Harmeling, Stefan A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Inlier-based ICA with an application to superimposed images N2 - This paper proposes a new independent component analysis (ICA) method which is able to unmix overcomplete mixtures of sparce or structured signals like speech, music or images. Furthermore, the method is designed to be robust against outliers, which is a favorable feature for ICA algorithms since most of them are extremely sensitive to outliers. Our approach is based on a simple outlier index. However, instead of robustifying an existing algorithm by some outlier rejection technique we show how this index can be used directly to solve the ICA problem for super-Gaussian sources. The resulting inlier-based ICA (IBICA) is outlier-robust by construction and can be used for standard ICA as well as for overcomplete ICA (i.e. more source signals than observed signals). (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc Y1 - 2005 SN - 0899-9457 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Lemm, Steven A1 - Blankertz, Benjamin A1 - Curio, Gabriel A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Spatio-spectral filters for improving the classification of single trial EEG N2 - Data recorded in electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interface experiments is generally very noisy, non-stationary, and contaminated with artifacts that can deteriorate discrimination/classification methods. In this paper, we extend the common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm with the aim to alleviate these adverse effects. In particular, we suggest an extension of CSP to the state space, which utilizes the method of time delay embedding. As we will show, this allows for individually tuned frequency filters at each electrode position and, thus, yields an improved and more robust machine learning procedure. The advantages of the proposed method over the original CSP method are verified in terms of an improved information transfer rate (bits per trial) on a set of EEG-recordings from experiments of imagined limb movements Y1 - 2005 SN - 0018-9294 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Meinecke, Frank C. A1 - Ziehe, Andreas A1 - Kurths, Jürgen A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Measuring phase synchronization of superimposed signals N2 - Phase synchronization is an important phenomenon that occurs in a wide variety of complex oscillatory processes. Measuring phase synchronization can therefore help to gain fundamental insight into nature. In this Letter we point out that synchronization analysis techniques can detect spurious synchronization, if they are fed with a superposition of signals such as in electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography data. We show how techniques from blind source separation can help to nevertheless measure the true synchronization and avoid such pitfalls Y1 - 2005 SN - 0031-9007 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kawanabe, Motoaki A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Estimating functions for blind separation when sources have variance dependencies N2 - A blind separation problem where the sources are not independent, but have variance dependencies is discussed. For this scenario Hyvarinen and Hurri (2004) proposed an algorithm which requires no assumption on distributions of sources and no parametric model of dependencies between components. In this paper, we extend the semiparametric approach of Amari and Cardoso (1997) to variance dependencies and study estimating functions for blind separation of such dependent sources. In particular, we show that many ICA algorithms are applicable to the variance-dependent model as well under mild conditions, although they should in principle not. Our results indicate that separation can be done based only on normalized sources which are adjusted to have stationary variances and is not affected by the dependent activity levels. We also study the asymptotic distribution of the quasi maximum likelihood method and the stability of the natural gradient learning in detail. Simulation results of artificial and realistic examples match well with our theoretical findings Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kawanabe, Motoaki A1 - Blanchard, Gilles A1 - Sugiyama, Masashi A1 - Spokoiny, Vladimir G. A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - A novel dimension reduction procedure for searching non-Gaussian subspaces N2 - In this article, we consider high-dimensional data which contains a low-dimensional non-Gaussian structure contaminated with Gaussian noise and propose a new linear method to identify the non-Gaussian subspace. Our method NGCA (Non-Gaussian Component Analysis) is based on a very general semi-parametric framework and has a theoretical guarantee that the estimation error of finding the non-Gaussian components tends to zero at a parametric rate. NGCA can be used not only as preprocessing for ICA, but also for extracting and visualizing more general structures like clusters. A numerical study demonstrates the usefulness of our method Y1 - 2006 UR - http://www.springerlink.com/content/105633/ U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/11679363_19 SN - 0302-9743 ER -