Unsupervised Parallel Feature Extraction from First Principles

We describe a number of learning rules that can be used to train unsupervised parallel feature extraction systems. The learning rules are derived using gradient ascent of a quality function. We consider a number of quality functions that are rational functions of higher order moments of the extracted feature values. We show that one system learns the principle components of the correlation matrix. Principal component analysis systems are usually not optimal feature extractors for classification.