Robustness of Minimum-Volume Nonnegative Matrix Factorization under an Expanded Sufficiently Scattered Condition

Minimum-volume nonnegative matrix factorization (min-vol NMF) has been used successfully in many applications, such as hyperspectral imaging, chemical kinetics, spectroscopy, topic modeling, and audio source separation. However, its robustness to noise has been a long-standing open problem. In this paper, we prove that min-vol NMF identifies the groundtruth factors in the presence of noise under a condition referred to as the expanded sufficiently scattered condition which requires the data points to be sufficiently well scattered in the latent simplex generated by the basis vectors.

Identifiability of Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions -- Part I: Theory

Tensor decompositions have become a central tool in data science, with applications in areas such as data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. A key property of many tensor decompositions, such as the canonical polyadic decomposition, is identifiability: the factors are unique, up to trivial scaling and permutation ambiguities. This allows one to recover the groundtruth sources that generated the data. The Tucker decomposition (TD) is a central and widely used tensor decomposition model. However, it is in general not identifiable. In this paper, we study the identifiability of the nonnegative TD (nTD). By adapting and extending identifiability results of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), we provide uniqueness results for nTD. Our results require the nonnegative matrix factors to have some degree of sparsity (namely, satisfy the separability condition, or the sufficiently scattered condition), while the core tensor only needs to have some slices (or linear combinations of them) or unfoldings with full column rank (but does not need to be nonnegative). Under such conditions, we derive several procedures, using either unfoldings or slices of the input tensor, to obtain identifiable nTDs by minimizing the volume of unfoldings or slices of the core tensor.