Dual semi-supervised convex nonnegative matrix factorization for data representation

Semi-supervised nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has received considerable attention in machine learning and data mining. A new semi-supervised NMF method, called dual semi-supervised convex nonnegative matrix factorization (DCNMF), is proposed in this paper for fully using the limited label information. Specifically, DCNMF simultaneously incorporates the pointwise and pairwise constraints of labeled samples as dual supervisory information into convex NMF, which results in a better low-dimensional data representation. Moreover, DCNMF imposes the nonnegative constraint only on the coefficient matrix but not on the base matrix. Consequently, DCNMF can process mixed-sign data, and hence enlarge the range of applications. We derive an efficient alternating iterative algorithm for DCNMF to solve the optimization, and analyze the proposed DCNMF method in terms of the convergence and computational complexity. We also discuss the relationships between DCNMF and several typical NMF based methods. Experimental results illustrate that DCNMF outperforms the related state-of-the-art NMF methods on nonnegative and mixed-sign datasets for clustering applications. This work is supported in part by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No. U1701266, 91648208, 61976175), and Guangdong Intellectual Property Big Data Key Laboratory (No. 2018B030322016).