Simulation results to assess the effect of varying noise levels on the ICA (orange) and NMF (blue) decompositions. The noise level increases from left to right across the plots (σ2 = 0.0005, 0.005, 0.05, 0.5). Different metrics are shown from top to bottom: reconstruction error, correlation between derived components and underlying sources, sparsity of components. The true number of underlying sources (K = 50) is denoted by a vertical dashed line.