BFA and BMF: What is the difference

Abstract

Studied are differences of two approaches to binary data dimension reduction. The first one is Boolean Matrix Factorization and the second one is Expectation Maximization Boolean Factor Analysis. The two BMF methods are used for comparison. First is M8 method from the BMDP statistical software package. The second is the BMF method, as suggested by Belohlavek and Vychodil (BVA2). These two are compared to Expectation Maximization Boolean Factor Analysis extended with binarization step developed here. Generated (Bars problem) and mushroom dataset are used for(experiments. In particular, under scrutiny was the reconstruction ability of the computed factors and the information gain as the measure of dimension reduction. In addition, presented are some general remarks on all the methods being compared.