Nonlinear Multiview Analysis: Identifiability and Neural Network-Assisted Implementation

Multiview analysis aims at extracting shared latent components from data samples that are acquired in different domains, e.g., image, text, and audio. Classic multiview analysis, e.g., canonical correlation analysis (CCA), tackles this problem via matching the linearly transformed views in a certain latent domain. More recently, powerful nonlinear learning tools such as kernel methods and neural networks are utilized for enhancing the classic CCA. However, unlike linear CCA whose theoretical aspects are clearly understood, nonlinear CCA approaches are largely intuition-driven. In particular, it is unclear under what conditions the shared latent components across the views can be identified—while identifiability plays an essential role in many applications. In this work, we revisit nonlinear multiview analysis and address both the theoretical and computational aspects. Our work leverages a useful nonlinear model, namely, the post-nonlinear model, from the nonlinear mixture separation literature. Combining with multiview data, we take a nonlinear multiview mixture learning viewpoint, which is a natural extension of the classic generative models for linear CCA. From there, we derive a learning criterion. We show that minimizing this criterion leads to identification of the latent shared components up to certain ambiguities, under reasonable conditions. Our derivation and formulation also offer new insights and interpretations to existing deep neural network-based CCA formulations. On the computation side, we propose an effective algorithm with simple and scalable update rules. A series of simulations and real-data experiments corroborate our theoretical analysis.