Generalized Separable Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a linear dimensionality technique for nonnegative data with applications such as image analysis, text mining, audio source separation and hyperspectral unmixing. Given a data matrix $M$ and a factorization rank $r$, NMF looks for a nonnegative matrix $W$ with $r$ columns and a nonnegative matrix $H$ with $r$ rows such that $M \approx WH$. NMF is NP-hard to solve in general. However, it can be computed efficiently under the separability assumption which requires that the basis vectors appear as data points, that is, that there exists an index set $\mathcal{K}$ such that $W = M(:,\mathcal{K})$. In this paper, we generalize the separability assumption: We only require that for each rank-one factor $W(:,k)H(k,:)$ for $k=1,2,\dots,r$, either $W(:,k) = M(:,j)$ for some $j$ or $H(k,:) = M(i,:)$ for some $i$. We refer to the corresponding problem as generalized separable NMF (GS-NMF). We discuss some properties of GS-NMF and propose a convex optimization model which we solve using a fast gradient method. We also propose a heuristic algorithm inspired by the successive projection algorithm. To verify the effectiveness of our methods, we compare them with several state-of-the-art separable NMF algorithms on synthetic, document and image data sets.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables. We have added discussions about the identifiability of the model, we have modified the first synthetic experiment, we have clarified some aspects of the contributio

Quantum Query Algorithms are Completely Bounded Forms

We prove a characterization of $t$-query quantum algorithms in terms of the unit ball of a space of degree-$2t$ polynomials. Based on this, we obtain a refined notion of approximate polynomial degree that equals the quantum query complexity, answering a question of Aaronson et al. (CCC'16). Our proof is based on a fundamental result of Christensen and Sinclair (J. Funct. Anal., 1987) that generalizes the well-known Stinespring representation for quantum channels to multilinear forms. Using our characterization, we show that many polynomials of degree four are far from those coming from two-query quantum algorithms. We also give a simple and short proof of one of the results of Aaronson et al. showing an equivalence between one-query quantum algorithms and bounded quadratic polynomials.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figures. v2: 27 pages, minor changes in response to referee comment

The Factorization method for three dimensional Electrical Impedance Tomography

The use of the Factorization method for Electrical Impedance Tomography has been proved to be very promising for applications in the case where one wants to find inhomogeneous inclusions in a known background. In many situations, the inspected domain is three dimensional and is made of various materials. In this case, the main challenge in applying the Factorization method consists in computing the Neumann Green's function of the background medium. We explain how we solve this difficulty and demonstrate the capability of the Factorization method to locate inclusions in realistic inhomogeneous three dimensional background media from simulated data obtained by solving the so-called complete electrode model. We also perform a numerical study of the stability of the Factorization method with respect to various modelling errors.Comment: 16 page

Gradient descent for sparse rank-one matrix completion for crowd-sourced aggregation of sparsely interacting workers

We consider worker skill estimation for the singlecoin Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In practice skill-estimation is challenging because worker assignments are sparse and irregular due to the arbitrary, and uncontrolled availability of workers. We formulate skill estimation as a rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem, where the observed components correspond to observed label correlation between workers. We show that the correlation matrix can be successfully recovered and skills identifiable if and only if the sampling matrix (observed components) is irreducible and aperiodic. We then propose an efficient gradient descent scheme and show that skill estimates converges to the desired global optima for such sampling matrices. Our proof is original and the results are surprising in light of the fact that even the weighted rank-one matrix factorization problem is NP hard in general. Next we derive sample complexity bounds for the noisy case in terms of spectral properties of the signless Laplacian of the sampling matrix. Our proposed scheme achieves state-of-art performance on a number of real-world datasets.Published versio