COMPETITIVE LEARNING, SIMULATED ANNEALING AND GENETIC ALGORITHMS FOR THE SEPARATION OF SOURCES C. G. PUNTONET, A. MANSOUR, F.ROJAS, Dpto. Arquitectura y Tec. Computadores University of Granada Spain ABSTRACT This paper presents a new adaptive procedure for the linear and non-linear separation of signals with nonuniform, symmetrical probability distributions, based on both simulated annealing (SA) and competitive learning (CL) methods by means of a neural network, considering the properties of the vectorial spaces of sources and mixtures, and using a multiple linearization in the mixture space. Also, the paper proposes the fusion of two important paradigms, Genetic Algorithms and the Blind Separation of Sources in Nonlinear Mixtures (GABSS). Although the topic of BSS, by means of various techniques, including ICA, PCA, and neural networks, has been amply discussed in the literature, to date the possibility of using genetic algorithms has not been seriously explored. However, in Nonlinear Mixtures, optimization of the system parameters and, especially, the search for invertible functions is very difficult due to the existence of many local minima. From experimental results, this paper demonstrates the possible benefits offered by GAs in combination with BSS, such as robustness against local minima, the parallel search for various solutions, and a high degree of flexibility in the evaluation function.The main characteristics of the method are its simplicity and the rapid convergence experimentally validated by the separation of many kinds of signals, such as speech or biomedical data. KEY WORDS: Independent Component Analysis, Separation of sources, Simulated annealing, Genetic algorithms, Neural networks.