Nonnegative factorization and the maximum edge biclique problem

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a data analysis technique based on the approximation of a nonnegative matrix with a product of two nonnegative factors, which allows compression and interpretation of nonnegative data. In this paper, we study the case of rank-one factorization and show that when the matrix to be factored is not required to be nonnegative, the corresponding problem (R1NF) becomes NP-hard. This sheds new light on the complexity of NMF since any algorithm for fixed-rank NMF must be able to solve at least implicitly such rank-one subproblems. Our proof relies on a reduction of the maximum edge biclique problem to R1NF. We also link stationary points of R1NF to feasible solutions of the biclique problem, which allows us to design a new type of biclique finding algorithm based on the application of a block-coordinate descent scheme to R1NF. We show that this algorithm, whose algorithmic complexity per iteration is proportional to the number of edges in the graph, is guaranteed to converge to a biclique and that it performs competitively with existing methods on random graphs and text mining datasets.