Performance Analysis of Non-negative Matrix Factorization Methods on TCGA Data

Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is recognized as one of fundamentally important and highly popular methods for clustering and feature selection, and many related methods have been proposed so far. Nevertheless, their performances, especially on real data, are still unclear due to few studies focusing on their comparison. This study aims at a assessment study of several representative methods from clustering and feature selection, including NMF, GNMF, MD-NMF, L2,1NMF, LNMF, Convex-NMF and Semi-NMF, on the data of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which is one of current research hotspot of bioinformatics. Specifically, three data types of four cancers are either separately or integratedly decomposed as the coefficient matrices and the basis matrices by these NMF methods. The coefficient matrices are evaluated by accuracies of clustered samples and the basis matrices are assessed by p-values of selected genes. Experiment results not only show merits and limitations of compared NMF methods, which may provide guidelines for applying them and proposing novel NMF methods, but also reveal several clues for the exploration of related cancers.