Boolean Matrix Factorization and Completion via Message Passing

Boolean factor analysis is the task of decomposing a binary matrix to the Boolean product of two binary factors. This unsupervised data-analysis approach is desirable due to its interpretability, but hard to perform due its NP-hardness. A closely related problem is low-rank Boolean matrix completion from noisy observations. We treat these problems as maximum a posteriori inference problems, and present message passing solutions that scale linearly with the number of observations and factors. Our empirical study demonstrates that message passing is able to recover low-rank Boolean matrices, in the boundaries of theoretically possible recovery and outperform existing techniques in real-world applications, such collaborative filtering with large-scale Boolean data.