Simultaneous Semi-NMF and PCA for Clustering

Cluster analysis is often carried out in combination with dimension reduction. The Semi-Non-negative Matrix Factorization (Semi-NMF) that learns a low-dimensional representation of a data set lends itself to a clustering interpretation. In this work we propose a novel approach to finding an optimal subspace of multi-dimensional variables for identifying a partition of the set of objects. The use of a low-dimensional representation can be of help in providing simpler and more interpretable solutions. We show that by doing so, our model is able to learn low-dimensional representations that are better suited for clustering, outperforming not only Semi-NMF, but also other NMF variants.