# Orthogonal Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with the Kullback-Leibler divergence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07786 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07786/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Successive Nonnegative Projection Algorithm for Robust Nonnegative Blind Source Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.7529/) (2013)
- [Hierarchical Clustering of Hyperspectral Images using Rank-Two Nonnegative Matrix Factorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.7441/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (ONMF) has become a standard approach for clustering. As far as we know, most works on ONMF rely on the Frobenius norm to assess the quality of the approximation. This paper presents a new model and algorithm for ONMF that minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. As opposed to the Frobenius norm which assumes Gaussian noise, the KL divergence is the maximum likelihood estimator for Poisson-distributed data, which can model better sparse vectors of word counts in document data sets and photo counting processes in imaging. We develop an algorithm based on alternating optimization, KL-ONMF, and show that it performs favorably with the Frobenius-norm based ONMF for document classification and hyperspectral image unmixing.
