Penalty hyperparameter optimization with diversity measure for nonnegative low-rank approximation

Abstract

Learning tasks are often based on penalized optimization problems in which a sparse solution is desired. This can lead to more interpretative results by identifying a smaller subset of important features or components and reducing the dimensionality of the data representation, as well. In this study, we propose a new method to solve a constrained Frobenius norm-based nonnegative low-rank approximation, and the tuning of the associated penalty hyperparameter, simultaneously. The penalty term added is a particular diversity measure that is more effective for sparseness purposes than other classical norm-based penalties (i.e., ${\ell }_1$ or ${\ell }_{2,1}$ norms). As it is well known, setting the hyperparameters of an algorithm is not an easy task. Our work drew on developing an optimization method and the corresponding algorithm that simultaneously solves the sparsity-constrained nonnegative approximation problem and optimizes its associated penalty hyperparameters. We test the proposed method by numerical experiments and show its promising results on several synthetic and real datasets.