Sparsity vs. statistical independence in adaptive signal representations: A case study of the spike process, (with B. Benichou), in Beyond Wavelets (G. V. Welland, ed.), Studies in Computational Mathematics, Vol. 10, Chap. 9, pp. 225-257, Academic Press, 2003.

Abstract

Finding a basis/coordinate system that can efficiently represent an input data stream by viewing them as realizations of a stochastic process is of tremendous importance in many fields including data compression and computational neuroscience. Two popular measures of such efficiency of a basis are sparsity (measured by the expected lp norm) and statistical independence (measured by the mutual information). Gaining deeper understanding of their intricate relationship, however, remains elusive. Therefore, we chose to study a simple synthetic stochastic process called the spike process, which puts a unit impulse at a random location in an n-dimensional vector for each realization. For this process, we obtained the following results: 1) The standard basis is the best both in terms of sparsity and statistical independence if n ≥ 5 and the search of basis is restricted within all possible orthonormal bases in Rn; 2) If we extend our basis search in all possible invertible linear transformations in Rn, then the best basis in statistical independence differs from the one in sparsity; 3) In either of the above, the best basis in statistical independence is not unique, and there even exist those which make the inputs completely dense; 4) There is no linear invertible transformation that achieves the true statistical independence for n > 2.

  • Get the full paper: gzipped PS file or PDF file.
  • Get the official version via doi:10.1016/S1570-579X(03)80037-X.


  • Please email me if you have any comments or questions!
    Go back to Naoki's Publication Page