We develop necessary and sufficient conditions and a novel provably consistent and efficient algorithm for discovering topics (latent factors) from observations (documents) that are realized from a probabilistic mixture of shared latent factors that have certain properties. Our focus is on the class of topic models in which each shared latent factor contains a novel word that is unique to that factor, a property that has come to be known as separability. Our algorithm is based on the key insight that the novel words correspond to the extreme points of the convex hull formed by the row-vectors of a suitably normalized word co-occurrence matrix. We leverage this geometric insight to establish polynomial computation and sample complexity bounds based on a few isotropic random projections of the rows of the normalized word co-occurrence matrix. Our proposed random-projections-based algorithm is naturally amenable to an efficient distributed implementation and is attractive for modern web-scale distributed data mining applications.
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is an alternative approach for topic estimation. NMF-based methods exploit the fact that both the topic matrix @math and the mixing weights are nonnegative and attempt to decompose the empirical observation matrix @math into a product of a nonnegative topic matrix @math and the matrix of mixing weights by minimizing a cost function of the form @cite_36 @cite_9 @cite_30 @cite_15 where @math is some measure of closeness and @math is a regularization term which enforces desirable properties, e.g., sparsity, on @math and the mixing weights. The NMF problem, however, is also known to be non-convex and @math -hard @cite_6 in general. Sub-optimal strategies such as alternating minimization, greedy gradient descent, and heuristics are used in practice @cite_9 .
@cite_30 @cite_36 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_15
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This paper describes a new approach, based on linear programming, for computing nonnegative matrix factorizations (NMFs). The key idea is a data-driven model for the factorization where the most salient features in the data are used to express the remaining features. More precisely, given a data matrix X, the algorithm identifies a matrix C such that X approximately equals CX and some linear constraints. The constraints are chosen to ensure that the matrix C selects features; these features can then be used to find a low-rank NMF of X. A theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach has guarantees similar to those of the recent NMF algorithm of (2012). In contrast with this earlier work, the proposed method extends to more general noise models and leads to efficient, scalable algorithms. Experiments with synthetic and real datasets provide evidence that the new approach is also superior in practice. An optimized C++ implementation can factor a multigigabyte matrix in a matter of minutes. Is perception of the whole based on perception of its parts? There is psychological1 and physiological2,3 evidence for parts-based representations in the brain, and certain computational theories of object recognition rely on such representations4,5. But little is known about how brains or computers might learn the parts of objects. Here we demonstrate an algorithm for non-negative matrix factorization that is able to learn parts of faces and semantic features of text. This is in contrast to other methods, such as principal components analysis and vector quantization, that learn holistic, not parts-based, representations. Non-negative matrix factorization is distinguished from the other methods by its use of non-negativity constraints. These constraints lead to a parts-based representation because they allow only additive, not subtractive, combinations. When non-negative matrix factorization is implemented as a neural network, parts-based representations emerge by virtue of two properties: the firing rates of neurons are never negative and synaptic strengths do not change sign. This book provides a broad survey of models and efficient algorithms for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). This includes NMFs various extensions and modifications, especially Nonnegative Tensor Factorizations (NTF) and Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions (NTD). NMF NTF and their extensions are increasingly used as tools in signal and image processing, and data analysis, having garnered interest due to their capability to provide new insights and relevant information about the complex latent relationships in experimental data sets. It is suggested that NMF can provide meaningful components with physical interpretations; for example, in bioinformatics, NMF and its extensions have been successfully applied to gene expression, sequence analysis, the functional characterization of genes, clustering and text mining. As such, the authors focus on the algorithms that are most useful in practice, looking at the fastest, most robust, and suitable for large-scale models. Key features: Acts as a single source reference guide to NMF, collating information that is widely dispersed in current literature, including the authors own recently developed techniques in the subject area. Uses generalized cost functions such as Bregman, Alpha and Beta divergences, to present practical implementations of several types of robust algorithms, in particular Multiplicative, Alternating Least Squares, Projected Gradient and Quasi Newton algorithms. Provides a comparative analysis of the different methods in order to identify approximation error and complexity. Includes pseudo codes and optimized MATLAB source codes for almost all algorithms presented in the book. The increasing interest in nonnegative matrix and tensor factorizations, as well as decompositions and sparse representation of data, will ensure that this book is essential reading for engineers, scientists, researchers, industry practitioners and graduate students across signal and image processing; neuroscience; data mining and data analysis; computer science; bioinformatics; speech processing; biomedical engineering; and multimedia. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a prominent technique for the analysis of image databases, text databases, and other information retrieval and clustering applications. The problem is most naturally posed as continuous optimization. In this report, we define an exact version of NMF. Then we establish several results about exact NMF: (i) that it is equivalent to a problem in polyhedral combinatorics; (ii) that it is NP-hard; and (iii) that a polynomial-time local search heuristic exists. We describe latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a generative probabilistic model for collections of discrete data such as text corpora. LDA is a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, in which each item of a collection is modeled as a finite mixture over an underlying set of topics. Each topic is, in turn, modeled as an infinite mixture over an underlying set of topic probabilities. In the context of text modeling, the topic probabilities provide an explicit representation of a document. We present efficient approximate inference techniques based on variational methods and an EM algorithm for empirical Bayes parameter estimation. We report results in document modeling, text classification, and collaborative filtering, comparing to a mixture of unigrams model and the probabilistic LSI model.