Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a natural model of admixture and
is widely used in science and engineering. A plethora of algorithms have been
developed to tackle NMF, but due to the non-convex nature of the problem, there
is little guarantee on how well these methods work. Recently a surge of
research have focused on a very restricted class of NMFs, called separable NMF,
where provably correct algorithms have been developed. In this paper, we
propose the notion of subset-separable NMF, which substantially generalizes the
property of separability. We show that subset-separability is a natural
necessary condition for the factorization to be unique or to have minimum
volume. We developed the Face-Intersect algorithm which provably and
efficiently solves subset-separable NMF under natural conditions, and we prove
that our algorithm is robust to small noise. We explored the performance of
Face-Intersect on simulations and discuss settings where it empirically
outperformed the state-of-art methods. Our work is a step towards finding
provably correct algorithms that solve large classes of NMF problems