Enhanced NMF initialization using a physical model for pollution source apportionment

In a previous work, we proposed an informed Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) with a specific parametrization which involves constraints about some known components of the factorization. In this paper we extend the above work by adding some information provided by a physical dispersion model. In particular, we derive a special structure of one of the factorizing matrices, which provides a better initialization of the NMF procedure. Experiments on simulated mixtures of particulate matter sources show that our new approach outperforms both our previous one and the state-of-the-art NMF methods.