A Two-Phase Algorithm for Robust Symmetric Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

As a special class of non-negative matrix factorization, symmetric non-negative matrix factorization (SymNMF) has been widely used in the machine learning field to mine the hidden non-linear structure of data. Due to the non-negative constraint and non-convexity of SymNMF, the efficiency of existing methods is generally unsatisfactory. To tackle this issue, we propose a two-phase algorithm to solve the SymNMF problem efficiently. In the first phase, we drop the non-negative constraint of SymNMF and propose a new model with penalty terms, in order to control the negative component of the factor. Unlike previous methods, the factor sequence in this phase is not required to be non-negative, allowing fast unconstrained optimization algorithms, such as the conjugate gradient method, to be used. In the second phase, we revisit the SymNMF problem, taking the non-negative part of the solution in the first phase as the initial point. To achieve faster convergence, we propose an interpolation projected gradient (IPG) method for SymNMF, which is much more efficient than the classical projected gradient method. Our two-phase algorithm is easy to implement, with convergence guaranteed for both phases. Numerical experiments show that our algorithm performs better than others on synthetic data and unsupervised clustering tasks.