Separation of Post-nonlinear Mixtures Using Ace and Temporal Decorrelation

We propose an efficient method based on the concept of maximal correlation that reduces the post-nonlinear blind source separation problem (PNL BSS) to a linear BSS problem. For this we apply the Alternating Conditional Expectation (ACE) algorithm – a powerful technique from nonparametric statistics – to approximately invert the (post-)nonlinear functions. Interestingly, in the framework of the ACE method convergence can be proven and in the PNL BSS scenario the optimal transformation found by ACE will coincide with the desired inverse functions. After the nonlinearities have been removed by ACE, temporal decorrelation (TD) allows us to recover the source signals. An excellent performance underlines the validity of our approach and demonstrates the ACE-TD method on realistic examples.