Ensemble learning for independent component analysis

It is well known that the applicability of independent component analysis (ICA) to high-dimensional pattern recognition tasks such as face recognition often suffers from two problems. One is the small sample size problem. The other is the choice of basis functions (or independent components). Both problems make ICA classifier unstable and biased. In this paper, we propose an enhanced ICA algorithm by ensemble learning approach, named as random independent subspace (RIS), to deal with the two problems. Firstly, we use the random resampling technique to generate some low dimensional feature subspaces, and one classifier is constructed in each feature subspace. Then these classifiers are combined into an ensemble classifier using a final decision rule. Extensive experimentations performed on the FERET database suggest that the proposed method can improve the performance of ICA classifier. (c) 2005 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.