Nonnegative singular value decomposition for microarray data analysis of spermatogenesis

Matrix factorization plays an important role in scientific computation. The widely used one is singular value decomposition (SVD) which approximates the original data matrix with three lower rank matrices with orthogonality constraints. Recently nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) considering the nonnegativity of data makes the results more interpretable than those of SVD. However NMF finds only two factor matrices and there is no significant index as singular values of SVD which can be used for sorting learned basis vectors. In this paper we take into account the nonnegativity for SVD and propose nonnegative SVD (NNSVD). The preliminary results on the microarray data of spermatogenesis show that NNSVD has advantages of both SVD and NMF.