Are there any benefits to running subjects in a group vs. running them individually?
Solution: It is possible to run them individually, however it can be difficult to know how to compare components (since they do not come out in any particular order and there may be different components revealed in different subject). It is not as straightforward to do group analyses with ICA as it is for, say, a model-based approach. For more details please refer to the 2001 Group ICA paper in Human Brain Mapping. A related question is whether to run one or two ICA analyses on different groups. If the groups are patient vs control it may make sense to run two ICA analyses. We will soon be adding some tools to GIFT to allow multi-group comparison.
