Fast Clustering and Topic Modeling Based on Rank-2 Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Abstract: The importance of unsupervised clustering and topic modeling is well recognized with ever-increasing volumes of text data. In this paper, we propose a fast method for hierarchical clustering and topic modeling called HierNMF2. Our method is based on fast Rank-2 nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) that performs binary clustering and an efficient node splitting rule. Further utilizing the final leaf nodes generated in HierNMF2 and the idea of nonnegative least squares fitting, we propose a new clustering/topic modeling method called FlatNMF2 that recovers a flat clustering/topic modeling result in a very simple yet significantly more effective way than any other existing methods. We implement highly optimized open source software in C++ for both HierNMF2 and FlatNMF2 for hierarchical and partitional clustering/topic modeling of document data sets. Substantial experimental tests are presented that illustrate significant improvements both in computational time as well as quality of solutions. We compare our methods to other clustering methods including K-means, standard NMF, and CLUTO, and also topic modeling methods including latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and recently proposed algorithms for NMF with separability constraints. Overall, we present efficient tools for analyzing large-scale data sets, and techniques that can be generalized to many other data analytics problem domains.