Avoiding flatness in factoring ordinal data

Factorization of classical, two-valued Boolean data became a widely studied topic in the past decade due to its role in analyzing relational data as well as its significance for other fields. Recently, various extensions to factorization of ordinal data, or data with graded (fuzzy) attributes, have been proposed. We identify and describe a fundamental problem regarding quality of factors, which is non-existent in the Boolean case, but naturally appears in the more general setting of ordinal data. As we demonstrate, the problem gets more significant with growing size of the factorized data. We analyze the problem, propose a method to alleviate it, and evaluate experimentally our solution to the problem. We also provide a discussion regarding ramifications of our findings for the concept of cardinality of fuzzy sets.