Unpaired Canonical Correlation Analysis

Nir Ben-Ari, Ronen Talmon, Uri Shaham

Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a fundamental method for multiview shared space learning. However, its strict reliance on paired data poses a significant limitation, as such data is often difficult to obtain or entirely unavailable. In this paper, we present Unpaired CCA (UCCA), a novel method that learns linear projections to maximize the correlation of the true underlying pairing without access to any paired samples during training. We first establish theoretical results connecting the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) to CCA. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we derive a practical method to maximize correlation exclusively from unpaired data. To the best of our knowledge, UCCA is the first approach to learn maximally correlated projections in a strictly unpaired setting. We validate UCCA on real-world multi-modal datasets, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms recent unpaired alignment baselines in recovering the underlying true correlation. This work fills a critical gap between traditional statistical multiview learning and the growing field of unpaired data learning.