Repeated decompositions reveal the stability of infomax decomposition of fMRI data.

In this study, we decomposed 12 fMRI data sets from six subjects each 101 times using the infomax algorithm. The first decomposition was taken as a reference decomposition; the others were used to form a component matrix of 100 by 100 components. Equivalence relations between components in this matrix, defined as maximum spatial correlations to the components of the reference decomposition, were found by the Hungarian sorting method and used to form 100 equivalence classes for each data set. We then tested the reproducibility of the matched components in the equivalence classes using uncertainty measures based on component distributions, time courses, and ROC curves. Infomax ICA rarely failed to derive nearly the same components in different decompositions. Very few components per data set were poorly reproduced, even using vector angle uncertainty measures stricter than correlation and detection theory measures.