as one of the methods of detecting exoplanets, especially for the direct imaging of circumstellar disks. Ren et al. (2018) are able to prove the stability of NMF components when they are constructed sequentially (i.e., one by one), which enables the linearity of the NMF modeling process; the linearity property is used to separate the stellar light and the light scattered from the exoplanets and circumstellar disks. In direct imaging, to reveal the faint exoplanets and circumstellar disks from bright the surrounding stellar lights, which has a typical contrast from 10⁵ to 10¹⁰, various statistical methods have been adopted, however the light from the exoplanets or circumstellar disks are usually over-fitted, where forward modeling have to be adopted to recover the true flux. Forward modeling is currently optimized for point sources, however not for extended sources, especially for irregularly shaped structures such as circumstellar disks. In this situation, NMF has been an excellent method, being less over-fitting in the sense of the non-negativity and sparsity of the NMF modeling coefficients, therefore forward modeling can be performed with a few scaling factors, rather than a computationally intensive data re-reduction on generated models. Data imputation To impute missing data in statistics, NMF can take missing data while minimizing its cost function, rather than treating these missing data as zeros. This makes it a mathematically proven method for data imputation in statistics. By first proving that the missing data are ignored in the cost function, then proving that the impact from missing data can be as small as a second order effect, Ren et al. (2020) studied and applied such an approach for the field of astronomy. Their work focuses on two-dimensional matrices, specifically, it includes mathematical derivation, simulated data imputation, and application to on-sky data. The data imputation procedure with NMF can be composed of two steps. First, when the NMF components are known, Ren et al. (2020) proved that impact from missing data during data imputation ("target modeling" in their study) is a second order effect. Second, when the NMF components are unknown, the authors proved that the impact from missing data during component construction is a first-to-second order effect. Depending on the way that the NMF components are obtained, the former step above can be either independent or dependent from the latter. In addition, the imputation quality can be increased when the more NMF components are used, see Figure 4