Adaptive computation of the Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF)

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), first proposed in 1994 for data analysis, has received successively much attention in a great variety of contexts such as data mining, text clustering, computer vision, bioinformatics, etc. In this paper the case of a symmetric matrix is considered and the symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SymNMF) is obtained by using a penalized nonsymmetric minimization problem. Instead of letting the penalizing parameter increase according to an a priori fixed rule, as suggested in literature, we propose a heuristic approach based on an adaptive technique. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed algorithm is effective.