Solution Of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Research Articles

Robust Self-expression Learning with Adaptive Noise Perception

Self-expression learning methods often obtain a coefficient matrix to measure the similarity between pairs of samples. However, directly using the raw data to represent each sample under the self-expression framework may not be ideal, as noise points are inevitably involved in the process of representing clean samples. To address this issue, this work proposes a novel self-expression model called robust Self-Expression learning with adaptive Noise Perception (SENP). SENP decomposes each sample into a clean part and a noisy part, and samples with large self-expression losses can be recognized as the noise points. A reliable coefficient matrix can then be learned by using only the clean points to reconstruct the clean part of each sample. By simultaneously detecting the noisy part of each sample and noise points, and adaptively mitigating their negative impacts, the representative ability of the generated coefficient matrix is improved. Moreover, inspired by the solution of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), an effective algorithm is formed to optimize SENP. Extensive experiments on well-known benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SENP compared to several state-of-the-art methods.

A neural network for determination of latent dimensionality in non-negative matrix factorization

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has proven to be a powerful unsupervised learning method for uncovering hidden features in complex and noisy data sets with applications in data mining, text recognition, dimension reduction, face recognition, anomaly detection, blind source separation, and many other fields. An important input for NMF is the latent dimensionality of the data, that is, the number of hidden features, K, present in the explored data set. Unfortunately, this quantity is rarely known a priori. The existing methods for determining latent dimensionality, such as automatic relevance determination (ARD), are mostly heuristic and utilize different characteristics to estimate the number of hidden features. However, all of them require human presence to make a final determination of K. Here we utilize a supervised machine learning approach in combination with a recent method for model determination, called NMFk, to determine the number of hidden features automatically. NMFk performs a set of NMF simulations on an ensemble of matrices, obtained by bootstrapping the initial data set, and determines which K produces stable groups of latent features that reconstruct the initial data set well. We then train a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier network to determine the correct number of latent features utilizing the statistics and characteristics of the NMF solutions, obtained from NMFk. In order to train the MLP classifier, a training set of 58 660 matrices with predetermined latent features were factorized with NMFk. The MLP classifier in conjunction with NMFk maintains a greater than 95% success rate when applied to a held out test set. Additionally, when applied to two well-known benchmark data sets, the swimmer and MIT face data, NMFk/MLP correctly recovered the established number of hidden features. Finally, we compared the accuracy of our method to ARD, AIC and stability-based methods.

Distributionally Robust and Multi-Objective Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a linear dimensionality reduction technique for analyzing nonnegative data. A key aspect of NMF is the choice of the objective function that depends on the noise model (or statistics of the noise) assumed on the data. In many applications, the noise model is unknown and difficult to estimate. In this paper, we define a multi-objective NMF (MO-NMF) problem, where several objectives are combined within the same NMF model. We propose to use Lagrange duality to judiciously optimize for a set of weights to be used within the framework of the weighted-sum approach, that is, we minimize a single objective function which is a weighted sum of the all objective functions. We design a simple algorithm based on multiplicative updates to minimize this weighted sum. We show how this can be used to find distributionally robust NMF (DR-NMF) solutions, that is, solutions that minimize the largest error among all objectives, using a dual approach solved via a heuristic inspired from the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach on synthetic, document and audio data sets. The results show that DR-NMF is robust to our incognizance of the noise model of the NMF problem.

A Discrete-Time Neurodynamic Approach to Sparsity-Constrained Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

Sparsity is a desirable property in many nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) applications. Although some level of sparseness of NMF solutions can be achieved by using regularization, the resulting sparsity depends highly on the regularization parameter to be valued in an ad hoc way. In this letter we formulate sparse NMF as a mixed-integer optimization problem with sparsity as binary constraints. A discrete-time projection neural network is developed for solving the formulated problem. Sufficient conditions for its stability and convergence are analytically characterized by using Lyapunov's method. Experimental results on sparse feature extraction are discussed to substantiate the superiority of this approach to extracting highly sparse features.

An Automatic Sparse Pruning Endmember Extraction Algorithm with a Combined Minimum Volume and Deviation Constraint

In this paper, an automatic sparse pruning endmember extraction algorithm with a combined minimum volume and deviation constraint (SPEEVD) is proposed. The proposed algorithm can adaptively determine the number of endmembers through a sparse pruning method and, at the same time, can weaken the noise interference by a minimum volume and deviation constraint. A non-negative matrix factorization solution based on the projection gradient is mathematically applied to solve the combined constrained optimization problem, which makes sure that the convergence is steady and robust. Experiments were carried out on both simulated data sets and real AVIRIS data sets. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method does not require a predetermined endmember number, but it still manifests an improvement in both the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the endmember spectra, compared to the other state-of-the-art methods, most of which need an accurate pre-estimation of endmember number.

A Collective Neurodynamic Optimization Approach to Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is an advanced method for nonnegative feature extraction, with widespread applications. However, the NMF solution often entails to solve a global optimization problem with a nonconvex objective function and nonnegativity constraints. This paper presents a collective neurodynamic optimization (CNO) approach to this challenging problem. The proposed collective neurodynamic system consists of a population of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) at the lower level and a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with wavelet mutation at the upper level. The RNNs act as search agents carrying out precise local searches according to their neurodynamics and initial conditions. The PSO algorithm coordinates and guides the RNNs with updated initial states toward global optimal solution(s). A wavelet mutation operator is added to enhance PSO exploration diversity. Through iterative interaction and improvement of the locally best solutions of RNNs and global best positions of the whole population, the population-based neurodynamic systems are almost sure able to achieve the global optimality for the NMF problem. It is proved that the convergence of the group-best state to the global optimal solution with probability one. The experimental results substantiate the efficacy and superiority of the CNO approach to bound-constrained global optimization with several benchmark nonconvex functions and NMF-based clustering with benchmark data sets in comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Scalable Linear Visual Feature Learning via Online Parallel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization.

Visual feature learning, which aims to construct an effective feature representation for visual data, has a wide range of applications in computer vision. It is often posed as a problem of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), which constructs a linear representation for the data. Although NMF is typically parallelized for efficiency, traditional parallelization methods suffer from either an expensive computation or a high runtime memory usage. To alleviate this problem, we propose a parallel NMF method called alternating least square block decomposition (ALSD), which efficiently solves a set of conditionally independent optimization subproblems based on a highly parallelized fine-grained grid-based blockwise matrix decomposition. By assigning each block optimization subproblem to an individual computing node, ALSD can be effectively implemented in a MapReduce-based Hadoop framework. In order to cope with dynamically varying visual data, we further present an incremental version of ALSD, which is able to incrementally update the NMF solution with a low computational cost. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed methods as well as their applications to image clustering and image retrieval.

Mixtures of Local Dictionaries for Unsupervised Speech Enhancement

We propose a novel extension of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) that models a signal with multiple local dictionaries activated sparsely. This set of local dictionaries for a source, e.g., speech, disjointly constitute a superset that is more discriminative than an ordinary NMF dictionary, because its local structures represent the source's manifold better. A block sparsity constraint is used to regularize the NMF solutions so that only one or a small number of blocks are active at a given time. Moreover, a concentrationz prior further regularizes each block of bases to be close to each other for better locality preservation. We test the proposed Mixture of Local Dictionaries (MLD) on single-channel speech enhancement tasks and show that it outperforms the state of the art technology by up to 2 dB in signal-to-distortion ratio, especially in the unsupervised environment where neither the speaker identity nor the type of noise is known in advance.

Source separation using regularized NMF with MMSE estimates under GMM priors with online learning for the uncertainties

We propose a new method to incorporate priors on the solution of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). The NMF solution is guided to follow the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimates of the weight combinations under a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) prior. The proposed algorithm can be used for denoising or single-channel source separation (SCSS) applications. NMF is used in SCSS in two main stages, the training stage and the separation stage. In the training stage, NMF is used to decompose the training data spectrogram for each source into a multiplication of a trained basis and gains matrices. In the separation stage, the mixed signal spectrogram is decomposed as a weighted linear combination of the trained basis matrices for the source signals. In this work, to improve the separation performance of NMF, the trained gains matrices are used to guide the solution of the NMF weights during the separation stage. The trained gains matrix is used to train a prior GMM that captures the statistics of the valid weight combinations that the columns of the basis matrix can receive for a given source signal. In the separation stage, the prior GMMs are used to guide the NMF solution of the gains/weights matrices using MMSE estimation. The NMF decomposition weights matrix is treated as a distorted image by a distortion operator, which is learned directly from the observed signals. The MMSE estimate of the weights matrix under the trained GMM prior and log-normal distribution for the distortion is then found to improve the NMF decomposition results. The MMSE estimate is embedded within the optimization objective to form a novel regularized NMF cost function. The corresponding update rules for the new objectives are derived in this paper. The proposed MMSE estimates based regularization avoids the problem of computing the hyper-parameters and the regularization parameters. MMSE also provides a better estimate for the valid gains matrix. Experimental results show that the proposed regularized NMF algorithm improves the source separation performance compared with using NMF without a prior or with other prior models.

Regularized nonnegative matrix factorization using Gaussian mixture priors for supervised single channel source separation

We introduce a new regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) method for supervised single-channel source separation (SCSS). We propose a new multi-objective cost function which includes the conventional divergence term for the NMF together with a prior likelihood term. The first term measures the divergence between the observed data and the multiplication of basis and gains matrices. The novel second term encourages the log-normalized gain vectors of the NMF solution to increase their likelihood under a prior Gaussian mixture model (GMM) which is used to encourage the gains to follow certain patterns. In this model, the parameters to be estimated are the basis vectors, the gain vectors and the parameters of the GMM prior. We introduce two different ways to train the model parameters, sequential training and joint training. In sequential training, after finding the basis and gains matrices, the gains matrix is then used to train the prior GMM in a separate step. In joint training, within each NMF iteration the basis matrix, the gains matrix and the prior GMM parameters are updated jointly using the proposed regularized NMF. The normalization of the gains makes the prior models energy independent, which is an advantage as compared to earlier proposals. In addition, GMM is a much richer prior than the previously considered alternatives such as conjugate priors which may not represent the distribution of the gains in the best possible way. In the separation stage after observing the mixed signal, we use the proposed regularized cost function with a combined basis and the GMM priors for all sources that were learned from training data for each source. Only the gain vectors are estimated from the mixed data by minimizing the joint cost function. We introduce novel update rules that solve the optimization problem efficiently for the new regularized NMF problem. This optimization is challenging due to using energy normalization and GMM for prior modeling, which makes the problem highly nonlinear and non-convex. The experimental results show that the introduced methods improve the performance of single channel source separation for speech separation and speech–music separation with different NMF divergence functions. The experimental results also show that, using the GMM prior gives better separation results than using the conjugate prior.

A novel initialization method for nonnegative matrix factorization and its application in component recognition with three-dimensional fluorescence spectra

Nonnegative matrix factorization has been widely used in many areas and has been applied for component recognition with three dimensional fluorescence spectra recently. However, nonnegative matrix factorization is a nonconvex programming in the iteration process, thus the solution is dependent on the initial values and consequently not unique. Up to now, an effective global convergent algorithm is still absent. In this work, we propose an initialization scheme based on independent component analysis. Compared with other initialization schemes, the optimal solution of nonnegative matrix factorization based on independent component analysis is much better and it is demonstrated by typical experiments of component recognition with three-dimensional fluorescence spectra.

Considerations on Parallelizing Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Hyperspectral Data Unmixing

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a recently developed linear unmixing technique that assumes that the original sources and transform were positively defined. Given that the linear mixing model (LMM) for hyperspectral data requires positive endmembers and abundances, with only minor modifications, NMF can be used to solve LMM. Traditionally, NMF solutions include an iterative process resulting in considerable execution times. In this letter, we provide two novel algorithms aimed at speeding the NMF through parallel processing: the first based on the traditional multiplicative solution and the second modifying an adaptive projected gradient technique known to provide better convergence. The algorithms' implementations were tested on various data sets; the results suggest that a significant speedup can be achieved without decrease in accuracy. This supports the further use of NMF for linear unmixing.