Sparse Non-linear CCA through Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion

We present SCCA-HSIC, a method for finding sparse non-linear multivariate relations in high-dimensional settings by maximizing the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC). We propose efficient optimization algorithms using a projected stochastic gradient and Nyström approximation of HSIC. We demonstrate the favourable performance of SCCA-HSIC over competing methods in detecting multivariate non-linear relations both in simulation studies, with varying numbers of related variables, noise variables, and samples, as well as in real datasets.