New SVD based initialization strategy for non-negative matrix factorization

There are two problems need to be dealt with for Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF): choose a suitable rank of the factorization and provide a good initialization method for NMF algorithms. This paper aims to solve these two problems using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). At first we extract the number of main components as the rank, actually this method is inspired from [1, 2]. Second, we use the singular value and its vectors to initialize NMF algorithm. In 2008, Boutsidis and Gollopoulos [3] provided the method titled NNDSVD to enhance initialization of NMF algorithms. They extracted the positive section and respective singular triplet information of the unit matrices {C( }j=1 which were obtained from singular vector pairs. This strategy aims to use positive section to cope with negative elements of the singular vectors, but in experiments we found that even replacing negative elements by their absolute values could get better results than NNDSVD. Hence, we give another method based SVD to fulfil initialization for NMF algorithms (SVD-NMF). Numerical experiments on two face databases ORL and YALE [4, 5] show that our method is better than NNDSVD.