  Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a popular machine learning
approach to many problems in text mining, speech and image processing,
bio-informatics and seismic data analysis to name a few. In NMF, a matrix of
non-negative data is approximated by the low-rank product of two matrices with
non-negative entries. In this paper, the approximation quality is measured by
the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the data and its low-rank
reconstruction. The existence of the simple multiplicative update (MU)
algorithm for computing the matrix factors has contributed to the success of
NMF. Despite the availability of algorithms showing faster convergence, MU
remains popular due to its simplicity. In this paper, a diagonalized Newton
algorithm (DNA) is proposed showing faster convergence while the implementation
remains simple and suitable for high-rank problems. The DNA algorithm is
applied to various publicly available data sets, showing a substantial speed-up
on modern hardware.
