Block Coordinate Descent for Sparse NMF

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$_0$ norm, however its optimization is NP-hard. Mixed norms, such as L$_1$/L$_2$ 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$_1$ norm. However, present algorithms designed for optimizing the mixed norm L$_1$/L$_2$ are slow and other formulations for sparse NMF have been proposed such as those based on L$_1$ and L$_0$ 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

Hyperspectral Unmixing Overview: Geometrical, Statistical, and Sparse Regression-Based Approaches

Imaging spectrometers measure electromagnetic energy scattered in their instantaneous field view in hundreds or thousands of spectral channels with higher spectral resolution than multispectral cameras. Imaging spectrometers are therefore often referred to as hyperspectral cameras (HSCs). Higher spectral resolution enables material identification via spectroscopic analysis, which facilitates countless applications that require identifying materials in scenarios unsuitable for classical spectroscopic analysis. Due to low spatial resolution of HSCs, microscopic material mixing, and multiple scattering, spectra measured by HSCs are mixtures of spectra of materials in a scene. Thus, accurate estimation requires unmixing. Pixels are assumed to be mixtures of a few materials, called endmembers. Unmixing involves estimating all or some of: the number of endmembers, their spectral signatures, and their abundances at each pixel. Unmixing is a challenging, ill-posed inverse problem because of model inaccuracies, observation noise, environmental conditions, endmember variability, and data set size. Researchers have devised and investigated many models searching for robust, stable, tractable, and accurate unmixing algorithms. This paper presents an overview of unmixing methods from the time of Keshava and Mustard's unmixing tutorial [1] to the present. Mixing models are first discussed. Signal-subspace, geometrical, statistical, sparsity-based, and spatial-contextual unmixing algorithms are described. Mathematical problems and potential solutions are described. Algorithm characteristics are illustrated experimentally.Comment: This work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensin

Using Underapproximations for Sparse Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization consists in (approximately) factorizing a nonnegative data matrix by the product of two low-rank nonnegative matrices. It has been successfully applied as a data analysis technique in numerous domains, e.g., text mining, image processing, microarray data analysis, collaborative filtering, etc. We introduce a novel approach to solve NMF problems, based on the use of an underapproximation technique, and show its effectiveness to obtain sparse solutions. This approach, based on Lagrangian relaxation, allows the resolution of NMF problems in a recursive fashion. We also prove that the underapproximation problem is NP-hard for any fixed factorization rank, using a reduction of the maximum edge biclique problem in bipartite graphs. We test two variants of our underapproximation approach on several standard image datasets and show that they provide sparse part-based representations with low reconstruction error. Our results are comparable and sometimes superior to those obtained by two standard Sparse Nonnegative Matrix Factorization techniques.Comment: Version 2 removed the section about convex reformulations, which was not central to the development of our main results; added material to the introduction; added a review of previous related work (section 2.3); completely rewritten the last part (section 4) to provide extensive numerical results supporting our claims. Accepted in J. of Pattern Recognitio

Conic Optimization Theory: Convexification Techniques and Numerical Algorithms

Optimization is at the core of control theory and appears in several areas of this field, such as optimal control, distributed control, system identification, robust control, state estimation, model predictive control and dynamic programming. The recent advances in various topics of modern optimization have also been revamping the area of machine learning. Motivated by the crucial role of optimization theory in the design, analysis, control and operation of real-world systems, this tutorial paper offers a detailed overview of some major advances in this area, namely conic optimization and its emerging applications. First, we discuss the importance of conic optimization in different areas. Then, we explain seminal results on the design of hierarchies of convex relaxations for a wide range of nonconvex problems. Finally, we study different numerical algorithms for large-scale conic optimization problems.Comment: 18 page

Sequential Sparse NMF

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a standard tool for data analysis. An important variant is the Sparse NMF problem. A natural measure of sparsity is the L₀ norm, however its optimization is NP-hard. Here, we consider a sparsity measure linear in the ratio of the L₁ and L₂ norms, and propose an efficient algorithm to handle the norm constraints which arise when optimizing this measure. Although algorithms for solving these are available, they are typically inefficient. We present experimental evidence that our new algorithm performs an order of magnitude faster compared to the previous state-of-the-art

Using underapproximations for sparse nonnegative matrix factorization

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has gathered a lot of attention in the last decade and has been successfully applied in numerous applications. It consists in the factorization of a nonnegative matrix by the product of two low-rank nonnegative matrices:. MªVW. In this paper, we attempt to solve NMF problems in a recursive way. In order to do that, we introduce a new variant called Nonnegative Matrix Underapproximation (NMU) by adding the upper bound constraint VW£M. Besides enabling a recursive procedure for NMF, these inequalities make NMU particularly well suited to achieve a sparse representation, improving the part-based decomposition. Although NMU is NP-hard (which we prove using its equivalence with the maximum edge biclique problem in bipartite graphs), we present two approaches to solve it: a method based on convex reformulations and a method based on Lagrangian relaxation. Finally, we provide some encouraging numerical results for image processing applications.nonnegative matrix factorization, underapproximation, maximum edge biclique problem, sparsity, image processing

Coordinate Descent for Mixed-norm NMF

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is widely used in a variety of machine learning tasks involving speech, documents and images. Being able to specify the structure of the matrix factors is crucial in incorporating prior information. The factors correspond to the feature matrix and the learnt representation. In particular, we allow an user-friendly specification of sparsity on the groups of features using the L1/L2 measure. Also, we propose a pairwise coordinate descent algorithm to minimize the objective. Experimental evidence of the efficacy of this approach is provided on the ORL faces dataset

Transfer nonnegative matrix factorization for image representation

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has received considerable attention due to its psychological and physiological interpretation of naturally occurring data whose representation may be parts based in the human brain. However, when labeled and unlabeled images are sampled from different distributions, they may be quantized into different basis vector space and represented in different coding vector space, which may lead to low representation fidelity. In this paper, we investigate how to extend NMF to cross-domain scenario. We accomplish this goal through TNMF - a novel semi-supervised transfer learning approach. Specifically, we aim to minimize the distribution divergence between labeled and unlabeled images, and incorporate this criterion into the objective function of NMF to construct new robust representations. Experiments show that TNMF outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real dataset