English

Step and Smooth Decompositions as Topological Clustering

Statistics Theory 2023-11-13 v1 Applications Machine Learning Statistics Theory

Abstract

We investigate a class of recovery problems for which observations are a noisy combination of continuous and step functions. These problems can be seen as non-injective instances of non-linear ICA with direct applications to image decontamination for magnetic resonance imaging. Alternately, the problem can be viewed as clustering in the presence of structured (smooth) contaminant. We show that a global topological property (graph connectivity) interacts with a local property (the degree of smoothness of the continuous component) to determine conditions under which the components are identifiable. Additionally, a practical estimation algorithm is provided for the case when the contaminant lies in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space of continuous functions. Algorithm effectiveness is demonstrated through a series of simulations and real-world studies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.05756,
  title  = {Step and Smooth Decompositions as Topological Clustering},
  author = {Luciano Vinas and Arash A. Amini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.05756},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:16:52.843Z