  Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a workhorse for signal and
data analytics, triggered by its model parsimony and interpretability. Perhaps
a bit surprisingly, the understanding to its model identifiability---the major
reason behind the interpretability in many applications such as topic mining
and hyperspectral imaging---had been rather limited until recent years.
Beginning from the 2010s, the identifiability research of NMF has progressed
considerably: Many interesting and important results have been discovered by
the signal processing (SP) and machine learning (ML) communities. NMF
identifiability has a great impact on many aspects in practice, such as
ill-posed formulation avoidance and performance-guaranteed algorithm design. On
the other hand, there is no tutorial paper that introduces NMF from an
identifiability viewpoint. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by
offering a comprehensive and deep tutorial on model identifiability of NMF as
well as the connections to algorithms and applications. This tutorial will help
researchers and graduate students grasp the essence and insights of NMF,
thereby avoiding typical `pitfalls' that are often times due to unidentifiable
NMF formulations. This paper will also help practitioners pick/design suitable
factorization tools for their own problems.
