ICA and the Real-Life Cocktail Party Problem

Why Independent Component Analysis fails its canonical thought experiment and what we can learn from this failure.

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) has — since significant development in the 1990’s¹ — become a commonly used data decomposition and preprocessing technique. ICA is a method for blind source separation (BSS): some number of independent sources are blindly mixed and the resulting mixture signals are received by some other number of observers. ICA approaches work to …

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