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Population-Based Hierarchical Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Survey Data

Computation 2022-09-13 v1

Abstract

Motivated by the problem of identifying potential hierarchical population structure on modern survey data containing a wide range of complex data types, we introduce population-based hierarchical non-negative matrix factorization (PHNMF). PHNMF is a variant of hierarchical non-negative matrix factorization based on feature similarity. As such, it enables an automatic and interpretable approach for identifying and understanding hierarchical structure in a data matrix constructed from a wide range of data types. Our numerical experiments on synthetic and real survey data demonstrate that PHNMF can recover latent hierarchical population structure in complex data with high accuracy. Moreover, the recovered subpopulation structure is meaningful and can be useful for improving downstream inference.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.04968,
  title  = {Population-Based Hierarchical Non-negative Matrix Factorization for Survey Data},
  author = {Xiaofu Ding and Xinyu Dong and Olivia McGough and Chenxin Shen and Annie Ulichney and Ruiyao Xu and William Swartworth and Jocelyn T. Chi and Deanna Needell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.04968},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:05:51.427Z