A Blind Source Separation Method for Nearly Degenerate Mixtures and Its Applications to NMR Spectroscopy
Yuanchang Sun, Jack X. Xin · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2011
In this paper, we develop a novel blind source separation (BSS) method for nonnegative and correlated data, particularly for the nearly degenerate data. The motivation lies in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, where a multiple mixture NMR spectra are recorded to identify chemical compounds with similar structures (degeneracy). There have been a number of successful approaches for solving BSS problems by exploiting the nature of source signals. For instance, independent component analysis (ICA) is used to separate statistically independent (orthogonal) source signals. However, signal orthogonality is not guaranteed in many real-world problems. This new BSS method developed here deals with nonorthogonal signals. The independence assumption is replaced by a condition which requires dominant interval(s) (DI) from each of source signals over others. Additionally, the mixing matrix is assumed to be nearly singular. The method first estimates the mixing matrix by exploiting geometry in data clustering. Due to the degeneracy of the data, a small deviation in the estimation may introduce errors (spurious peaks of negative values in most cases) in the output. To resolve this challenging problem and improve robustness of the separation, methods are developed in two aspects. One technique is to find a better estimation of the mixing matrix by allowing a constrained perturbation to the clustering output, and it can be achieved by a quadratic programming. The other is to seek sparse source signals by exploiting the DI condition, and it solves an $\ell_1$ optimization. We present numerical results of NMR data to show the performance and reliability of the method in the applications arising in NMR spectroscopy.