Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Orthogonality Constraints

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a popular method for multivariate analysis of nonnegative data, the goal of which is to decompose a data matrix into a product of two factor matrices with all entries in factor matrices restricted to be nonnegative. NMF was shown to be useful in a task of clustering (especially document clustering), but in some cases NMF produces the results inappropriate to the clustering problems. In this paper, we present an algorithm for orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization, where an orthogonality constraint is imposed on the nonnegative decomposition of a term-document matrix. The result of orthogonal NMF can be clearly interpreted for the clustering problems, and also the performance of clustering is usually better than that of the NMF. We develop multiplicative updates directly from true gradient on Stiefel manifold, whereas existing algorithms consider additive orthogonality constraints. Experiments on several different document data sets show our orthogonal NMF algorithms perform better in a task of clustering, compared to the standard NMF and an existing orthogonal NMF.