Clustering and Integrating of Heterogeneous Microbiome Data by Joint Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Laplacian Regularization.

Many datasets that exists in the real world are often comprised of different representations or views which provide complementary information to each other. To integrate information from multiple views, data integration approaches such as nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) have been developed to combine multiple heterogeneous data simultaneously to obtain a comprehensive representation. In this paper, we proposed a novel variant of symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF), called Laplacian regularization based joint symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (LJ-SNMF) for clustering multi-view data. We conduct extensive experiments on several realistic datasets including Human Microbiome Project data. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other variants of NMF, which suggests the potential application of LJ-SNMF in clustering multi-view datasets. Additionally, we also demonstrate the capability of LJ-SNMF in community finding.