Recently, deep convolutional networks have demonstrated their capability of improving the discriminative power compared with other machine learning method, but its feature learning mechanism is not very clear. In this paper, we present a cascaded linear convolutional network, based on independent component analysis (ICA) filters, named ICANet. ICANet consists of three parts: a convolutional layer, a binary hash, and a block histogram. It has the following advantages over other methods: (1) the network structure is simple and computationally efficient, (2) the ICA filter is trained with an unsupervised algorithm using unlabeled samples, which is practical, and (3) compared to deep learning models, each layer parameter in ICANet can be easily trained. Thus, ICANet can be used as a benchmark for the application of a deep learning framework for large-scale image classification. Finally, we test two public databases, AR and FERET, showing that ICANet performs well in facial recognition tasks.

Time series forecasting is a very vital research topic. The scale of time series in numerous industries has risen considerably in recent years as a result of the advancement of information technology. However, the existing algorithms pay little attention to generating large-scale time series. This article designs a state causality and adaptive covariance decomposition-based time series forecasting method (SCACD). As an observation sequence, the majority of time series is generated under the influence of hidden states. First, SCACD builds neural networks to adaptively estimate the mean and covariance matrix of latent variables; Then, SCACD employs causal convolution to forecast the distribution of future latent variables; Lastly, to avoid loss of information, SCACD applies a sampling approach based on Cholesky decomposition to generate latent variables and observation sequences. Compared to existing outstanding time series prediction models on six real datasets, the model can achieve long-term forecasting while also being lighter, and the forecasting accuracy is improved in the great majority of the prediction tasks.