  This paper describes algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)
with the beta-divergence (beta-NMF). The beta-divergence is a family of cost
functions parametrized by a single shape parameter beta that takes the
Euclidean distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the Itakura-Saito
divergence as special cases (beta = 2,1,0, respectively). The proposed
algorithms are based on a surrogate auxiliary function (a local majorization of
the criterion function). We first describe a majorization-minimization (MM)
algorithm that leads to multiplicative updates, which differ from standard
heuristic multiplicative updates by a beta-dependent power exponent. The
monotonicity of the heuristic algorithm can however be proven for beta in (0,1)
using the proposed auxiliary function. Then we introduce the concept of
majorization-equalization (ME) algorithm which produces updates that move along
constant level sets of the auxiliary function and lead to larger steps than MM.
Simulations on synthetic and real data illustrate the faster convergence of the
ME approach. The paper also describes how the proposed algorithms can be
adapted to two common variants of NMF : penalized NMF (i.e., when a penalty
function of the factors is added to the criterion function) and convex-NMF
(when the dictionary is assumed to belong to a known subspace).
