Relation between PLSA and NMF and Implications

by Eric Gaussier and Cyril Goutte

This paper's critical point is PLSA solve the NMF problem with a KL divergence loss, which can be easily seen if you are familiar with the two algorithms. The implications are:

• The NMF algorithms can be interpreted as EM algorithms;
• The NMF does not hold many advantages as pLSA.
• But NMF might benefit with many loss functions for different purposes.