Computing a Nonnegative Matrix Factorization---Provably

In this letter, we consider the nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problem and several NMF variants. Two approaches based on DC (difference of convex functions) programming and DCA (DC algorithm) are developed. The first approach follows the alternating framework that requires solving, at each iteration, two nonnegativity-constrained least squares subproblems for which DCA-based schemes are investigated. The convergence property of the proposed algorithm is carefully studied. We show that with suitable DC decompositions, our algorithm generates most of the standard methods for the NMF problem. The second approach directly applies DCA on the whole NMF problem. Two algorithms-one computing all variables and one deploying a variable selection strategy-are proposed. The proposed methods are then adapted to solve various NMF variants, including the nonnegative factorization, the smooth regularization NMF, the sparse regularization NMF, the multilayer NMF, the convex/convex-hull NMF, and the symmetric NMF. We also show that our algorithms include several existing methods for these NMF variants as special versions. The efficiency of the proposed approaches is empirically demonstrated on both real-world and synthetic data sets. It turns out that our algorithms compete favorably with five state-of-the-art alternating nonnegative least squares algorithms.

Nonnegative matrix factorization and I-divergence alternating minimization

We present a numerical algorithm for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) problems under noisy separability. An NMF problem under separability can be stated as one of finding all vertices of the ...

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used in feature extraction and dimension reduction fields. Essentially, it is an optimization problem to determine two non-negative low rank matrices \(W_{m \times k}\) and \(H_{k \times n}\) for a given matrix \(A_{m \times n}\), satisfying \(A_{m \times n} \approx W_{m \times k}H_{k \times n}\). In this paper, a novel approach to improve the image decomposing and reconstruction effects by introducing the Singular Value Decomposing (SVD)-based initialization scheme of factor matrices W and H, and another measure called choosing rule to determine the optimum value of factor rank k, are proposed. The input image is first decomposed using SVD to get its singular values and corresponding eigenvectors. Then, the number of main components as the rank value k is extracted. Then, the singular values and corresponding eigenvectors are used to initialize W and H based on selected rank k. Finally, convergent results are obtained using multiplicative and additive update rules. However, iterative NMF algorithms’ convergence is very slow on most platforms limiting its practicality. To this end, a parallel implementation frame of described improved NMF algorithm using CUDA, a tool for algorithms parallelization on massively parallel processors, i.e., many-core graphics processors, is presented. Experimental results show that our approach can get better decomposing effect than traditional NMF implementations and dramatic accelerate rate comparing to serial schemes as well as existing distributed-system implementations.

The significance of Non-negative Matrix Factorization ((NMF) in the field of automatic text summarization is rapidly increasing due to its interpretation and storage capabilities. Interpretation defines the ease at which the structure of high dimensional data can be understood. While, storage capability relates to the extent of data reduction process achieved by NMF. The parametric values that serve as input to the NMF process include initialization method, rank of factorization, sparseness measure and maximum iteration. These inputs are vital to the output produced by NMF. These parameters of NMF were not been considered in the existing literature on Automatic Text Summarization (ATS). This paper sheds light specifically on sparseness of NMF when applied to ATS and the impact it makes to the quality of the summary generated. In this study on NMF algorithm that supports sparseness is treated with various degree of sparsity and its performance impact on text summary generated is compared with other NMF algorithms without sparseness constraints.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) provides a lower rank approximation of a matrix. Due to nonnegativity imposed on the factors, it gives a latent structure that is often more physically meaningful than other lower rank approximations such as singular value decomposition (SVD). Most of the algorithms proposed in literature for NMF have been based on minimizing the Frobenius norm. This is partly due to the fact that the minimization problem based on the Frobenius norm provides much more flexibility in algebraic manipulation than other divergences. In this paper we propose a fast NMF algorithm that is applicable to general Bregman divergences. Through Taylor series expansion of the Bregman divergences, we reveal a relationship between Bregman divergences and Euclidean distance. This key relationship provides a new direction for NMF algorithms with general Bregman divergences when combined with the scalar block coordinate descent method. The proposed algorithm generalizes several recently proposed methods for computation of NMF with Bregman divergences and is computationally faster than existing alternatives. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with experiments conducted on artificial as well as real world data.

How quickly can we compute the nonnegative rank (r) of an m x n matrix? This problem ---- and the companion problem of finding a nonnegative matrix factorization with minimum inner-dimension ---- has a rich history, with applications in quantum mechanics, probability theory, data analysis, communication complexity and polyhedral combinatorics. Here we will survey the recent progress on this question, that has essentially resolved its worst-case complexity.

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) approximates a given data matrix as a product of two low rank nonnegative matrices, usually by minimizing the L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> or the KL distance between the data matrix and the matrix product. This factorization was shown to be useful for several important computer vision applications. We propose here a new NMF algorithm that minimizes the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) error between the data and the matrix product. We propose an iterative NMF algorithm (EMD NMF) and prove its convergence. The algorithm is based on linear programming. We discuss the numerical difficulties of the EMD NMF and propose an efficient approximation. Naturally, the matrices obtained with EMD NMF are different from those obtained with L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> NMF. We discuss these differences in the context of two challenging computer vision tasks - texture classification and face recognition - and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.

Characterizing sediment sources by non-negative matrix factorization of detrital geochronological data

Analysis of two-mode network data using nonnegative matrix factorization

Lee and Seung proposed nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithms to decompose patterns and images for structure retrieving. The NMF algorithms have been applied to various optimization problems. However, it is difficult to prove the convergence of this class of learning algorithms. This paper presents the global minima analysis of the NMF algorithms. In the analysis, invariant set is constructed so that the non-divergence of the algorithms can be guaranteed in the set. Using the features of linear equation systems and their solutions, the fixed points and convergence properties of the update algorithms are discussed in detail. The analysis shows that, although the cost function is not convex in both A and X together, it is possible to obtain the global minima from the particular learning algorithms. For different initializations, simulations are presented to confirm the analysis results.

Matrix factorization plays an important role in scientific computation. The widely used one is singular value decomposition (SVD) which approximates the original data matrix with three lower rank matrices with orthogonality constraints. Recently nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) considering the nonnegativity of data makes the results more interpretable than those of SVD. However NMF finds only two factor matrices and there is no significant index as singular values of SVD which can be used for sorting learned basis vectors. In this paper we take into account the nonnegativity for SVD and propose nonnegative SVD (NNSVD). The preliminary results on the microarray data of spermatogenesis show that NNSVD has advantages of both SVD and NMF.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been one of the most popular methods for feature learning in the field of machine learning and computer vision. Most existing works directly apply NMF on high-dimensional image datasets for computing the effective representation of the raw images. However, in fact, the common essential information of a given class of images is hidden in their low rank parts. For obtaining an effective low-rank data representation, we in this paper propose a non-negative low-rank matrix factorization (NLMF) method for image clustering. For the purpose of improving its robustness for the data in a manifold structure, we further propose a graph regularized NLMF by incorporating the manifold structure information into our proposed objective function. Finally, we develop an efficient alternating iterative algorithm to learn the low-dimensional representation of low-rank parts of images for clustering. Alternatively, we also incorporate robust principal component analysis into our proposed scheme. Experimental results on four image datasets reveal that our proposed methods outperform four representative methods.

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has found numerous applications, due to its ability to provide interpretable decompositions. Perhaps surprisingly, existing results regarding its uniqueness properties are rather limited, and there is much room for improvement in terms of algorithms as well. Uniqueness and computational aspects of NMF are revisited here from a geometrical point of view. Both symmetric and asymmetric NMF are considered, the former being tantamount to element-wise non-negative square-root factorization of positive semidefinite matrices. New and insightful uniqueness results are derived, e.g., it is shown that a sufficient condition for uniqueness is that the conic hull of the latent factors is a superset of a particular second-order cone. Checking this is shown to be NP-complete; yet it offers insights on latent sparsity, as is also shown in a new necessary condition, to a smaller extent. On the computational side, a new efficient algorithm for symmetric NMF is proposed which uses Procrustes rotations. Simulation results show promising performance with respect to the state-of-art. The new algorithm is also applied to a clustering problem for co-authorship data, yielding meaningful and interpretable results.

In this work, we will consider the dimension reduction of the set of time series, such as economic data, to find the meaningful basis vector for the set of data, and indicate which data use which basis vector. Usually each of the time series is analyzed independently in economics but here we will analyze the set of time series simultaneously. Since some of the economic data are measured as positive values and we want to decompose them as a mixture of the parts, we will apply non-negative matrix factorization to the economic data. Non-negative matrix factorization can compress dimensions by approximating a non-negative matrix with the product of two non-negative matrices. The two non-negative matrices are called the coefficient matrix and the basis matrix, and the basis matrix can be considered as a dimensionally compressed matrix. If the standard non-negative matrix factorization is used for economic data, the basis matrix may not be smooth. We think that the basis vectors should be smooth except a few special economical incidents. In the proposed method, a Graph-based non-negative matrix factorization is introduced to regularize the basis matrix of the time series. A path graph for representing the time series of economic data is incorporated into the non-negative matrix factorization as regularization. As a result, basis vectors that maintains the time series of economic data are decomposed. Furthermore, we propose to introduce a sparsity in the non-negative matrix factorization. Traditionally, the sparsity incorporated into non-negative matrix factorization has been used for basis vectors. However, the proposed method introduces the sparsity for coefficient vectors. Thus the proposed method, which simultaneously incorporates the sparsity for the coefficient vectors and the smoothness for the basis vectors, can extract the smooth basis vectors and the original economical data are approximated as the weighted sum of the few bases vectors. This allows us to discover economic trends and the best-fit trends for each data at the same time.