Advanced airborne radars must perform target detection in the presence of interference and heavy clutter. In many applications, the practical usefulness of adaptive arrays is limited by their convergence rate. In this paper, we first analyze the performance of the SMI method. Then, two other methods, the transformed SMI and the eigencanceler, both based on the principle component inversion (PCI) technique, are described and analyzed by simulation. It is shown by simulation based comparison that the transformed SMI and the Eigencanceler outperform the SMI method. It is also shown that the transformed SMI and the eigencanceler has higher convergence rate in terms of output signal-to-noise ratio than the SMI, specially for short data record sizes. It is concluded that the transformed SMI and the eigencanceler are good alternatives to the SMI method when data set available is small.