Robust Structured Convex Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Data Representation

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a popular technique for machine learning. Its power is that it can decompose a nonnegative matrix into two nonnegative factors whose product well approximates the nonnegative matrix. However, the nonnegative constraint of the data matrix limits its application. Additionally, the representations learned by NMF fail to respect the intrinsic geometric structure of the data. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised matrix factorization method, called Robust Structured Convex Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (RSCNMF). RSCNMF not only achieves meaningful factorizations of the mixed-sign data, but also learns a discriminative representation by leveraging local and global structures of the data. Moreover, it introduces the L
_2,1
-norm loss function to deal with noise and outliers, and exploits the L
_2,1
-norm feature regularizer to select discriminative features across all the samples. We develop an alternate iterative scheme to solve such a new model. The convergence of RSCNMF is proven theoretically and verified empirically. The experimental results on eight real-world data sets show that our RSCNMF algorithm matches or outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.