This article reviews some key aspects of two important branches in unsupervised signal processing: blind deconvolution and blind source separation (BSS). It also gives an overview of their potential application in seismic processing, with an emphasis on seismic deconvolution. Finally, it presents illustrative results of the application, on both synthetic and real data, of a method for seismic deconvolution that combines techniques of blind deconvolution and blind source separation. Our implementation of this method contains some improvements overthe original method in the literature described.

Potentiometry with ion-selective electrodes (ISEs) provides a simple and cheap approach for estimating ionic activities. However, a well-known shortcoming of ISEs regards their lack of selectivity. Recent works have suggested that smart sensor arrays equipped with a blind source separation (BSS) algorithm offer a promising solution to the interference problem. In fact, the use of blind methods eases the time-demanding calibration stages needed in the typical approaches. In this work, we develop a Bayesian source separation method for processing the outputs of an ISE array. The major benefit brought by the Bayesian framework is the possibility of taking into account some prior information, which can result in more realistic solutions. Concerning the inference stage, it is conducted by means of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. The validity of our approach is supported by experiments with artificial data and also in a scenario with real data.

In multicriteria decision aiding (MCDA), the Choquet integral has been used as an aggregation operator to deal with the case of interacting decision criteria. In this context, a practical problem that arises is related to the identification of the parameters associated with the Choquet integral, which are known as the Choquet capacities. In this paper, we address the problem of capacity identification by means of unsupervised learning, which, in MCDA, refers to the situations in which only the decision matrix is available. Our contribution is twofold. First, we discuss the extension of some previous works on the subject as well as some of their limitations. Then, we introduce a novel method, which is able to associate the parameters of the Choquet integral with the decision table correlation structure. As attested by numerical experiments, the proposed approach is conceptually simple to be implemented and can detect interactions between criteria in a data-driven fashion.