Publications [#322382] of Rong Ge

Papers Published

1. Ge, R; Zou, J, Intersecting faces: Non-negative matrix factorization with new guarantees, 32nd International Conference on Machine Learning Icml 2015, vol. 3 (January, 2015), pp. 2285-2293, ISBN 9781510810587
   (last updated on 2026/01/16)

   Abstract:
   Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a natural model of admixture and is widely used in science and engineering. A plethora of algorithms have been developed to tackle NMF, but due to the non-convex nature of the problem, there is little guarantee on how well these methods work. Recently a surge of research have focused on a very restricted class of NMFs, called separable NMF, where provably correct algorithms have been developed. In this paper, we propose the notion of subset-separable NMF, which substantially generalizes the property of separability. We show that subset-separability is a natural necessary condition for the factorization to be unique or to have minimum volume. We developed the Face-Intersect algorithm which provably and efficiently solves subset-separable NMF under natural conditions, and we prove that our algorithm is robust to small noise. We explored the performance of Face-Intersect on simulations and discuss settings where it empirically outperformed the state-of-art methods. Our work is a step towards finding provably correct algorithms that solve large classes of NMF problems.