Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a ubiquitous tool for data analysis. An important variant is the sparse NMF problem which arises when we explicitly require the learnt features to be sparse. A natural measure of sparsity is the L @math norm, however its optimization is NP-hard. Mixed norms, such as L @math L @math measure, have been shown to model sparsity robustly, based on intuitive attributes that such measures need to satisfy. This is in contrast to computationally cheaper alternatives such as the plain L @math norm. However, present algorithms designed for optimizing the mixed norm L @math L @math are slow and other formulations for sparse NMF have been proposed such as those based on L @math and L @math norms. Our proposed algorithm allows us to solve the mixed norm sparsity constraints while not sacrificing computation time. We present experimental evidence on real-world datasets that shows our new algorithm performs an order of magnitude faster compared to the current state-of-the-art solvers optimizing the mixed norm and is suitable for large-scale datasets.
 An unsupervised learning algorithm for the separation of sound sources in one-channel music signals is presented. The algorithm is based on factorizing the magnitude spectrogram of an input signal into a sum of components, each of which has a fixed magnitude spectrum and a time-varying gain. Each sound source, in turn, is modeled as a sum of one or more components. The parameters of the components are estimated by minimizing the reconstruction error between the input spectrogram and the model, while restricting the component spectrograms to be nonnegative and favoring components whose gains are slowly varying and sparse. Temporal continuity is favored by using a cost term which is the sum of squared differences between the gains in adjacent frames, and sparseness is favored by penalizing nonzero gains. The proposed iterative estimation algorithm is initialized with random values, and the gains and the spectra are then alternatively updated using multiplicative update rules until the values converge. Simulation experiments were carried out using generated mixtures of pitched musical instrument samples and drum sounds. The performance of the proposed method was compared with independent subspace analysis and basic nonnegative matrix factorization, which are based on the same linear model. According to these simulations, the proposed method enables a better separation quality than the previous algorithms. Especially, the temporal continuity criterion improved the detection of pitched musical sounds. The sparseness criterion did not produce significant improvements Motivation: Many practical pattern recognition problems require non-negativity constraints. For example, pixels in digital images and chemical concentrations in bioinformatics are non-negative. Sparse non-negative matrix factorizations (NMFs) are useful when the degree of sparseness in the non-negative basis matrix or the non-negative coefficient matrix in an NMF needs to be controlled in approximating high-dimensional data in a lower dimensional space. Results: In this article, we introduce a novel formulation of sparse NMF and show how the new formulation leads to a convergent sparse NMF algorithm via alternating non-negativity-constrained least squares. We apply our sparse NMF algorithm to cancer-class discovery and gene expression data analysis and offer biological analysis of the results obtained. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed sparse NMF algorithm often achieves better clustering performance with shorter computing time compared to other existing NMF algorithms. Availability: The software is available as supplementary material. Contact:hskim@cc.gatech.edu, hpark@acc.gatech.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. We propose a novel nonnegative matrix factorization model that aims at finding localized, part-based, representations of nonnegative multivariate data items. Unlike the classical nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) technique, this new model, denoted "nonsmooth nonnegative matrix factorization" (nsNMF), corresponds to the optimization of an unambiguous cost function designed to explicitly represent sparseness, in the form of nonsmoothness, which is controlled by a single parameter. In general, this method produces a set of basis and encoding vectors that are not only capable of representing the original data, but they also extract highly focalized patterns, which generally lend themselves to improved interpretability. The properties of this new method are illustrated with several data sets. Comparisons to previously published methods show that the new nsNMF method has some advantages in keeping faithfulness to the data in the achieving a high degree of sparseness for both the estimated basis and the encoding vectors and in better interpretability of the factors. 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. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised algorithm based on sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to improve separation of speech from background music in monaural signals. In our approach, fixed speech basis vectors are obtained from training data whereas music bases are estimated on-the-fly to cope with spectral variability while preserving small NMF dimensionality for decreased computation effort. In a large-scale experimental evaluation with 168 speakers from the TIMIT database, we compare the semi-supervised method to supervised NMF with an explicit background music model. Our results reveal that the semi-supervised method outperforms supervised NMF at low speech-to-music ratios, and that sparsity constraints on the music spectra to enforce harmonicity can improve separation performance. 