Successive Projection Algorithm Robust to Outliers

Abstract: The successive projection algorithm (SPA) is a fast algorithm to tackle separable nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). Given a nonnegative data matrix $X$, SPA identifies an index set $\mathcal{K}$ such that there exists a nonnegative matrix $H$ with $X \approx X(:,\mathcal{K})H$. SPA has been successfully used as a pure-pixel search algorithm in hyperspectral unmixing and for anchor word selection in document classification. Moreover, SPA is provably robust in low-noise settings. The main drawbacks of SPA are that it is not robust to outliers and does not take the data fitting term into account when selecting the indices in $\mathcal{K}$. In this paper, we propose a new SPA variant, dubbed Robust SPA (RSPA), that is robust to outliers while still being provably robust in low-noise settings, and that takes into account the reconstruction error for selecting the indices in $\mathcal{K}$. We illustrate the effectiveness of RSPA on synthetic data sets and hyperspectral images.