Non-negative matrix factorization is a basic tool for decomposing data into the feature and weight matrices under non-negativity constraints, and in practice is often solved in the alternating minimization framework. However, it is unclear whether such algorithms can recover the ground-truth feature matrix when the weights for different features are highly correlated, which is common in applications. This paper proposes a simple and natural alternating gradient descent based algorithm, and shows that with a mild initialization it provably recovers the ground-truth in the presence of strong correlations. In most interesting cases, the correlation can be in the same order as the highest possible. Our analysis also reveals its several favorable features including robustness to noise. We complement our theoretical results with empirical studies on semi-synthetic datasets, demonstrating its advantage over several popular methods in recovering the ground-truth.
Non-negative matrix factorization has a rich empirical history, starting with the practical algorithms of @cite_16 @cite_5 @cite_10 . It has been widely used in applications and there exist various methods for NMF, e.g., @cite_1 @cite_10 @cite_18 @cite_3 @cite_2 . However, they do not have provable recovery guarantees.
@cite_18 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_10
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Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a recently popularized technique for learning parts-based, linear representations of non-negative data. The traditional NMF is optimized under the Gaussian noise or Poisson noise assumption, and hence not suitable if the data are grossly corrupted. To improve the robustness of NMF, a novel algorithm named robust nonnegative matrix factorization (RNMF) is proposed in this paper. We assume that some entries of the data matrix may be arbitrarily corrupted, but the corruption is sparse. RNMF decomposes the non-negative data matrix as the summation of one sparse error matrix and the product of two non-negative matrices. An efficient iterative approach is developed to solve the optimization problem of RNMF. We present experimental results on two face databases to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a very efficient parameter-free method for decomposing multivariate data into strictly positive activations and basis vectors. However, the method is not suited for overcomplete representations, where usually sparse coding paradigms apply. We show how to merge the concepts of non-negative factorization with sparsity conditions. The result is a multiplicative algorithm that is comparable in efficiency to standard NMF, but that can be used to gain sensible solutions in the overcomplete cases. This is of interest e.g. for the case of learning and modeling of arrays of receptive fields arranged in a visual processing map, where an overcomplete representation is unavoidable. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), i.e. V ap WH where both V, W and H are non-negative has become a widely used blind source separation technique due to its part based representation. The NMF decomposition is not in general unique and a part based representation not guaranteed. However, imposing sparseness both improves the uniqueness of the decomposition and favors part based representation. Sparseness in the form of attaining as many zero elements in the solution as possible is appealing from a conceptional point of view and corresponds to minimizing reconstruction error with an L0 norm constraint. In general, solving for a given L0 norm is an NP hard problem thus convex relaxation to regularization by the L1 norm is often considered, i.e., minimizing (1 2||V - WH||F 2 + lambda||H||1).An open problem is to control the degree of sparsity lambda imposed. We here demonstrate that a full regularization path for the L1 norm regularized least squares NMF for fixed W can be calculated at the cost of an ordinary least squares solution based on a modification of the least angle regression and selection (LARS) algorithm forming a non-negativity constrained LARS (NLARS). With the full regularization path, the L1 regularization strength lambda that best approximates a given L0 can be directly accessed and in effect used to control the sparsity of H. The MATLAB code for the NLARS algorithm is available for download. We introduce an algorithm for a non-negative 3D tensor factorization for the purpose of establishing a local parts feature decomposition from an object class of images. In the past, such a decomposition was obtained using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) where images were vectorized before being factored by NMF. A tensor factorization (NTF) on the other hand preserves the 2D representations of images and provides a unique factorization (unlike NMF which is not unique). The resulting "factors" from the NTF factorization are both sparse (like with NMF) but also separable allowing efficient convolution with the test image. Results show a superior decomposition to what an NMF can provide on all fronts - degree of sparsity, lack of ghost residue due to invariant parts and efficiency of coding of around an order of magnitude better. Experiments on using the local parts decomposition for face detection using SVM and Adaboost classifiers demonstrate that the recovered features are discriminatory and highly effective for classification.