Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a promising data-driven matrix decomposition method, and is becoming very active and attractive in machine learning and blind source separation areas. So far NMF algorithm has been widely used in diverse applications, including image processing, anti-collision for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems and audio signal analysis, and so on. However the typical NMF algorithms cannot work well in underdetermined mixture, i.e., the number of observed signals is less than that of source signals. In practical applications, adding suitable constraints fused into NMF algorithm can achieve remarkable decomposition results. As a motivation, this paper proposes to add the minimum volume and minimum correlation constrains (MCV) to the NMF algorithm, which makes the new algorithm named MCV-NMF algorithm suitable for underdetermined scenarios where the source signals satisfy mutual independent assumption. Experimental simulation results validate that the MCV-NMF algorithm has a better performance improvement in solving RFID tag anti-collision problem than that of using the nearest typical NMF method.

This study presents a joint dictionary learning approach for speech emotion recognition named locality preserved joint nonnegative matrix factorization (LP-JNMF). The learned representations are shared between the learned dictionaries and annotation matrix. Moreover, a locality penalty term is incorporated into the objective function. Thus, the system's discriminability is further improved.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the most popular machine learning tools for speech enhancement. The supervised NMF-based speech enhancement is accomplished by updating iteratively with the prior knowledge of the clean speech and noise spectra bases. However, in many real-world scenarios, it is not always possible for conducting any prior training. The traditional semi-supervised NMF (SNMF) version overcomes this shortcoming while the performance degrades. In this letter, without any prior knowledge of the speech and noise, we present an improved semi-supervised NMF-based speech enhancement algorithm combining techniques of NMF and robust principal component analysis (RPCA). In this approach, fixed speech bases are obtained from the training samples chosen from public dateset offline. The noise samples used for noise bases training, instead of characterizing a priori as usual, can be obtained via RPCA algorithm on the fly. This letter also conducts a study on the assumption whether the time length of the estimated noise samples may have an effect on the performance of the algorithm. Three metrics, including PESQ, SDR and SNR are applied to evaluate the performance of the algorithms by making experiments on TIMIT with 20 noise types at various signal-to-noise ratio levels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the competing speech enhancement algorithm.

An online nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm based on recursive least squares (RLS) is described in a matrix form, and a simplified algorithm for a low-complexity calculation is developed for frame-by-frame online audio source separation system. First, the online NMF algorithm based on the RLS method is described as solving the NMF problem recursively. Next, a simplified algorithm is developed to approximate the RLS-based online NMF algorithm with low complexity. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in terms of audio source separation, and the results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms are superior to that of the conventional online NMF algorithm with significantly reduced complexity.

In tutoring systems, students are more likely to utilize hints to assist their decisions about difficult or confusing problems. In the meanwhile, students with weaker knowledge mastery tend to choose more hints than others with stronger knowledge mastery. Hints are important assistances to help students deal with questions. Students can learn from hints and enhance their knowledge about questions. In this paper we firstly use hints alone to build a model named Hints-Model to predict student performance. In addition, matrix factorization (MF) has been prevalent in educational fields to predict student performance, which is derived from their success in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems (RS). While there is another factorization method named non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) which has been developed over one decade, and has additional non-negative constrains on the factorization matrices. Considering the sparseness of the original matrix and the efficiency, we can utilize an element-based matrix factorization called regularized single-element-based NMF (RSNMF). We compared the results of different factorization methods to their combination with Hints-Model. From the experiment results on two datasets, we can find the combination of RSNMF with Hints-Model has achieved significant improvement and obtains the best result. We have also compared the Hints-Model with the pioneer approach performance factor analysis (PFA), and the outcomes show that the former method exceeds the later one.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is one of the most popular tools for speech enhancement. In this letter, we present an improved semi-supervised NMF (ISNMF)-based speech enhancement algorithm combining techniques of noise estimation and Incremental NMF (INMF). In this approach, fixed speech bases are obtained from training samples offline in advance while noise bases are trained on-the-fly whenever new noisy frame arrives. The INMF algorithm is adopted for noise bases learning because it can overcome the difficulties that conventional NMF confronts in online processing. The proposed algorithm is real-time capable in the sense that it processes the time frames of the noisy speech one by one and the computational complexity is feasible. Four different objective evaluation measures at various signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over traditional semi-supervised NMF (SNMF) and well-known robust principal component analysis (RPCA) algorithm.

The development of multichannel audio systems has increased the need for multichannel contents. However, the supply of multichannel audio contents is not sufficient for advanced multichannel systems. Therefore, home entertainment manufacturers need upmixing systems, including systems that utilize monaural time-frequency domain information. Therefore, a monaural ambience extraction algorithm based on nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been developed recently. Ambience signals refer to sound components that do not have obvious spatial images, e.g., wind, rain, and diffuse sound. The developed algorithm provides good upmixing performance; however, the algorithm is a batch process and therefore, it cannot be used by home audio manufacturers. In this paper, we propose an on-line monaural ambience extraction algorithm. The proposed algorithm analyzes the dominant components with an on-line NMF algorithm, and extracts the remaining sound as ambience components. Experiments were performed with artificial mixed signals and real music signals, and the performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with the performance of the conventional batch algorithm as a reference. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm extracts the ambience components as well as the batch algorithm, despite the on-line constraints.

In this paper, we present update rules for convolutive nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) in which cost functions are based on the squared Euclidean distance, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the Itakura-Saito (IS) divergence. We define an auxiliary function for each cost function and derive the update rule. We also apply this method to the single-channel signal separation in speech signals. Experimental results showed that the convergence of our KL divergence-based method was better than that in the conventional method, and our method achieved single-channel signal separation successfully.

This paper presents a method for learning an overcomplete, nonnegative dictionary and for obtaining the corresponding coefficients so that a group of nonnegative signals can be sparsely represented by them. This is accomplished by posing the learning as a problem of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) with maximization of the incoherence of the dictionary and of the sparsity of coefficients. By incorporating a dictionary-incoherence penalty and a sparsity penalty in the NMF formulation and then adopting a hierarchically alternating optimization strategy, we show that the problem can be cast as two sequential optimal problems of quadratic functions. Each optimal problem can be solved explicitly so that the whole problem can be efficiently solved, which leads to the proposed algorithm, i.e., sparse hierarchical alternating least squares (SHALS). The SHALS algorithm is structured by iteratively solving the two optimal problems, corresponding to the learning process of the dictionary and to the estimating process of the coefficients for reconstructing the signals. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm performs better than the nonnegative K-SVD (NN-KSVD) algorithm and several other famous algorithms, and its computational cost is remarkably lower than the compared algorithms.

Recursive least squares-based online nonnegative matrix factorization (RLS-ONMF), an NMF algorithm based on the RLS method, was developed to solve the NMF problem online. However, this method suffers from a partial-data problem. In this study, the partial-data problem is resolved by developing an improved online NMF algorithm using RLS and a sparsity constraint. The proposed method, RLS-based online sparse NMF (RLS-OSNMF), consists of two steps; an estimation step that optimizes the Euclidean NMF cost function, and a shaping step that satisfies the sparsity constraint. The proposed algorithm was evaluated with recorded speech and music data and with the RWC music database. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than conventional RLS-ONMF, especially during the adaptation process.

In this paper, an on-line nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm for acoustic signal processing systems is developed based on the recursive least squares (RLS) method. In order to develop the on-line NMF algorithm, we reformulate the NMF problem into multiple least squares (LS) normal equations, and solve the reformulated problems using RLS methods. In addition, we eliminate the irrelevant calculations based on the NMF model. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated with a well-known dataset used for NMF performance evaluation and with real acoustic signals; the results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the conventional algorithm in on-line applications.

Most document clustering methods are a challenging issue for improving clustering performance. Document clustering based on semantic features is highly efficient. However, the method sometimes did not successfully cluster some documents, such as highly articulated documents. In order to improve the clustering success of complex documents using semantic features, this paper proposes a document clustering method that uses terms of the condensing document clusters and fuzzy association to efficiently cluster specific documents into meaningful topics based on the document set. The proposed method improves the quality of document clustering because it can extract documents from the perspective of the terms of the cluster topics using semantic features and synonyms, which can also better represent the inherent structure of the document in connection with the document cluster topics. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better document clustering performance than other methods.

This paper presents a systemic analysis for phase noise performances of the series quadrature oscillator (QOSC) by using the time-variant impulse sensitivity function (ISF) model. The effective ISF for each noise source in the oscillator is derived mathematically. According to these effective ISFs, the explicit closed-form expression for phase noise due to the total thermal noise in the series QOSC is derived, and the phase noise contribution from the flicker noise in the regenerative and coupling transistors is also figured out. The phase noise contributions from the thermal noise and the flicker noise are verified by SpectreRF simulations.

This paper presents a systemic analysis for phase noise performances of differential cross-coupled LC oscillators by using Hajimiri and Lee's model. The effective impulse sensitivity functions (ISF) for each noise source in the oscillator is mathematically derived. According to these effective ISFs, the phase noise contribution from each device is figured out, and phase noise contributions from the device noise in the vicinity of the integer multiples of the resonant frequency, weighted by the Fourier coefficients of the effective ISF, are also calculated. The explicit closed-form expression for phase noise of the oscillator is definitely determined. The validity of the phase noise analysis is verified by good simulation agreement.

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and its extensions such as Nonnegative Tensor Factorization (NTF) have become prominent techniques for blind sources separation (BSS), analysis of image databases, data mining and other information retrieval and clustering applications. In this paper we propose a family of efficient algorithms for NMF/NTF, as well as sparse nonnegative coding and representation, that has many potential applications in computational neuroscience, multi-sensory processing, compressed sensing and multidimensional data analysis. We have developed a class of optimized local algorithms which are referred to as Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares (HALS) algorithms. For these purposes, we have performed sequential constrained minimization on a set of squared Euclidean distances. We then extend this approach to robust cost functions using the alpha and beta divergences and derive flexible update rules. Our algorithms are locally stable and work well for NMF-based blind source separation (BSS) not only for the over-determined case but also for an under-determined (over-complete) case (i.e., for a system which has less sensors than sources) if data are sufficiently sparse. The NMF learning rules are extended and generalized for N-th order nonnegative tensor factorization (NTF). Moreover, these algorithms can be tuned to different noise statistics by adjusting a single parameter. Extensive experimental results confirm the accuracy and computational performance of the developed algorithms, especially, with usage of multi-layer hierarchical NMF approach [3].