Group studies involving large cohorts of subjects are important to draw general conclusions about brain functional organization. However, the aggregation of data coming from multiple subjects is challenging, since it requires accounting for large variability in anatomy, functional topography and stimulus response across individuals. Data modeling is especially hard for ecologically relevant conditions such as movie watching, where the experimental setup does not imply well-defined cognitive operations. We propose a novel MultiView Independent Component Analysis (ICA) model for group studies, where data from each subject are modeled as a linear combination of shared independent sources plus noise. Contrary to most group-ICA procedures, the likelihood of the model is available in closed form. We develop an alternate quasi-Newton method for maximizing the likelihood, which is robust and converges quickly. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach first on fMRI data, where our model demonstrates improved sensitivity in identifying common sources among subjects. Moreover, the sources recovered by our model exhibit lower between-sessions variability than other methods.

Additional Feedback: Line 77: The model assumes full rank (square mixing matrices). This forces some kind of dimension reduction tool (PCA) to be applied to the data prior to ICA. However, it has been shown that such a two-step approach is sup-optimal, relative to algorithms that perform combined dimension reduction and ICA (see: Artoni et al., 2018, NeuroImage 175, p.176). Line 88: The model assumes noise is in source space and independent cross views. Such models have been investigated before in the ICA literature (see e.g.: Lukic et al., 2002, Proceedings International Conference on Image Processing Vol. 2. IEEE).

Group studies involving large cohorts of subjects are important to draw general conclusions about brain functional organization. However, the aggregation of data coming from multiple subjects is challenging, since it requires accounting for large variability in anatomy, functional topography and stimulus response across individuals. Data modeling is especially hard for ecologically relevant conditions such as movie watching, where the experimental setup does not imply well-defined cognitive operations. We propose a novel MultiView Independent Component Analysis (ICA) model for group studies, where data from each subject are modeled as a linear combination of shared independent sources plus noise. Contrary to most group-ICA procedures, the likelihood of the model is available in closed form.