# Approaches for Whitening Data

February 09, 2021
Table of Content

Consider a dataset $\mathcal{D} = \{ \mathbf x_i \in \reals^d\}_{i=1}^n$. Denote $\mathbf X \in \reals^{d \times n}$ be the data matrix. Without loss of generality, we assume that the data has zero mean; thus the covariance matrix is $\Sigma = \frac{1}{n} \mathbf X \mathbf X^T$.

Define $\psi(\cdot)$ be the whitening operator parameterized by $W$, which is commonly referred to whitening matrix. Let $\hat \mathbf X := \psi(\mathbf X)$. The goal of whitening is to decorate the data; that is

$\frac{1}{n} \hat \mathbf{X} \hat \mathbf{X}^T = \hat \Sigma = I.$

Recall that $\Sigma$ is symmetric and positive definite; it thus can be decomposed into

$\Sigma = U \Lambda U^T,$

where $U$'s columns are $\Sigma$'s eigenvectors and $\Lambda$ is a diagonal matrix containing real eigenvalues $\sigma^2_i\ \forall i \in [1,d]$.

Because $U$ is a orthonormal matrix, i.e. $\mathbf u_i ^T \mathbf u_j = 0 \forall i,j \in [1, m]$ and $i\ne j$. Consider $\mathbf u_i$. The above derivation shows that

\begin{aligned} ( \mathbf u_i ^T \mathbf X) (\mathbf u_i ^T \mathbf X)^T &= \sum_{j=1}^n (\mathbf u_i^T \mathbf x_j)^2 \\ &= \sigma_i^2. \end{aligned}

In other word, we would like to find $W$ that satisfies $W^T W= \Sigma^{-1}$. We can see this condition yields the diagonal coraviance condition:

\begin{aligned} \hat{\mathbf X}\hat{\mathbf X}^T &= (W\mathbf X)^T (W\mathbf X) \\ &= \mathbf X^T W^T W\mathbf X \\ &= \mathbf X^T W^T W\mathbf X \\ &= \mathbf X^T \Sigma^{-1} \mathbf X \\ &= \mathbf X^T U \Lambda^{-1} U^T\mathbf X \\ &= nI \end{aligned}

## Approach 1: PCA-Whitening

With this fact, the natural choice of the whitening operator is

$\psi_{\text{PCA}}(\mathbf X) = \underbrace{\Lambda^{-1/2} U^T}_{:=W_\text{PCA}} \mathbf X.$

Thus, we can see that

\begin{aligned} W_{\text{PCA}}^TW_{\text{PCA}} &= (\Lambda^{-1/2} U^T)^T \Lambda^{-1/2} U^T \\ &= U \Lambda^{-1/2}\Lambda^{-1/2} U^T \\ &= U \Lambda^{-1}U^T \\ &= \Sigma^{-1}. \end{aligned}

## Approach 2: ZCA-Whitening

However, whitening is not unique because whitened data remains whitened when transform. We can impose an additional constraint on $\psi$. In particular, we can rotate the PCA-whitened data to be close to the original data. This is called Zero-Phase Component Analysis (ZCA):

\begin{aligned} \psi_\text{ZCA}(\mathbf X) &= {U \Lambda^{-1/2}U^T}\mathbf X \\ &= \underbrace{U \Lambda^{-1/2}U^T}_{W_{\text{ZCA}}} \mathbf X. \end{aligned}

In fact, one can see that $W_\text{ZCA} = \Sigma^{-1/2}$.

## Approach 3: Cholesky Decomposition

For a positive definite matrix $\Sigma$, we know that we can decompose it into

$\Sigma = L L^T ,$

where $L$ is a lower triangular matrix. Inverting the equation above gives us

\begin{aligned} \Sigma^{-1} &= (LL^T)^{-1} \\ &= (L^T)^{-1} L^{-1} \\ &\overset{(1)}{=} (L^{-1})^{T} L^{-1}, \end{aligned}

where (1) uses the fact that matrix inverse and transpose are exchangeable. Here, it is obvious that we can take

$W_\text{chol} = L^{-1}.$

Because $L^{-1}$ is also a lower triangular matrix. This invert can be computed efficiently using forward substitution.

Figure 1: Data whitened with various approaches. Although the results look similar, ZCA-whitened data is closed to the original.

## Appendix

These are resources that I consult while writing this blog: