  The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of
nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of
determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is
difficult; however it has many potential applications, e.g., in data mining,
graph theory and computational geometry. In particular, it can be used to
characterize the minimal size of any extended reformulation of a given
combinatorial optimization program. In this paper, we introduce and study a
related quantity, called the restricted nonnegative rank. We show that
computing this quantity is equivalent to a problem in polyhedral combinatorics,
and fully characterize its computational complexity. This in turn sheds new
light on the nonnegative rank problem, and in particular allows us to provide
new improved lower bounds based on its geometric interpretation. We apply these
results to slack matrices and linear Euclidean distance matrices and obtain
counter-examples to two conjectures of Beasly and Laffey, namely we show that
the nonnegative rank of linear Euclidean distance matrices is not necessarily
equal to their dimension, and that the rank of a matrix is not always greater
than the nonnegative rank of its square.
