Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the most frequently-used
matrix factorization models in data analysis. A significant reason to the
popularity of NMF is its interpretability and the `parts of whole'
interpretation of its components. Recently, max-times, or subtropical, matrix
factorization (SMF) has been introduced as an alternative model with equally
interpretable `winner takes it all' interpretation. In this paper we propose a
new mixed linear--tropical model, and a new algorithm, called Latitude, that
combines NMF and SMF, being able to smoothly alternate between the two. In our
model, the data is modeled using the latent factors and latent parameters that
control whether the factors are interpreted as NMF or SMF features, or their
mixtures. We present an algorithm for our novel matrix factorization. Our
experiments show that our algorithm improves over both baselines, and can yield
interpretable results that reveal more of the latent structure than either NMF
or SMF alone.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. To appear in 2018 SIAM International Conference
on Data Mining (SDM '18). For the source code, see
https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~pmiettin/linear-tropical
