Online nonnegative matrix factorization with robust stochastic approximation.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a popular dimension-reduction method and has been widely applied to image processing and pattern recognition problems. However, conventional NMF learning methods require the entire dataset to reside in the memory and thus cannot be applied to large-scale or streaming datasets. In this paper, we propose an efficient online RSA-NMF algorithm (OR-NMF) that learns NMF in an incremental fashion and thus solves this problem. In particular, OR-NMF receives one sample or a chunk of samples per step and updates the bases via robust stochastic approximation. Benefitting from the smartly chosen learning rate and averaging technique, OR-NMF converges at the rate of in each update of the bases. Furthermore, we prove that OR-NMF almost surely converges to a local optimal solution by using the quasi-martingale. By using a buffering strategy, we keep both the time and space complexities of one step of the OR-NMF constant and make OR-NMF suitable for large-scale or streaming datasets. Preliminary experimental results on real-world datasets show that OR-NMF outperforms the existing online NMF (ONMF) algorithms in terms of efficiency. Experimental results of face recognition and image annotation on public datasets confirm the effectiveness of OR-NMF compared with the existing ONMF algorithms.