ECML PKDD 2008

The Boolean Column and Column-Row Matrix Decompositions

Matrix decompositions are used for many data mining purposes. One of these purposes is to find a concise but interpretable representation of a given data matrix. Different decomposition formulations have been proposed for this task, many of which assume a certain property of the input data (e.g., nonnegativity) and aim at preserving that property in the decomposition. In this paper we propose new decomposition formulations for binary matrices, namely the Boolean CX and CUR decompositions. They are natural combinations two previously presented decomposition formulations. We consider also two subproblems of these decompositions and present a rigorous theoretical study of the subproblems. We give algorithms for the decompositions and for the subproblems, and study their performance via extensive experimental evaluation. We show that even simple algorithms can give accurate and intuitive decompositions of real data, thus demonstrating the power and usefulness of the proposed decompositions.