SPLICE: Fully Tractable Hierarchical Extension of ICA with Pooling

We present a novel probabilistic framework for a hierarchical extension of independent component analysis (ICA), with a particular motivation in neuroscientific data analysis and modeling. The framework incorporates a general subspace pooling with linear ICA-like layers stacked recursively. Unlike related previous models, our generative model is fully tractable: both the likelihood and the posterior estimates of latent variables can readily be computed with analytically simple formulae. The model is particularly simple in the case of complex-valued data since the pooling can be reduced to taking the modulus of complex numbers. Experiments on electroencephalography (EEG) and natural images demonstrate the validity of the method.