A self-contained walk through the math behind NMF — deriving the multiplicative update rules from first principles and proving they converge, following Lee & Seung (1999) and Lee & Seung (2001).

Covers:

  • Problem setup and two objective functions (Frobenius norm, KL divergence)
  • Matrix calculus preliminaries
  • Derivation of multiplicative update rules for both objectives
  • Full convergence proof via auxiliary functions (Euclidean case)
  • Convergence sketch for the divergence case
  • Summary of the proof architecture

Read the full proof (PDF)