A method for operating a smelter to produce a pure base metal, said method comprising producing said pure base metal in pots with the aid of a digital computer and a central database for storing data derived from a metal smelter process to produce a pure base metal, said data comprising process variables comprising power and resistance, noise control, feed control and chemicals received from said pots for said smelter process, comprising:
- means for mining hidden correlations among heterogeneous data within said central database;
- means decomposing instance feature data ({tilde over (X)}ij} into three non-negative matrices;
- means decomposing instance feature data (Yt) into three non-negative matrices;
- means regularizing task relatedness, view (feature type) consistence and label correlations;
- means for determining the objective function iteratively;
- wherein for said task relatedness, the jth view/feature type, said decomposition of {tilde over (X)}ij in different tasks shares the same feature encoding matrix Cj;
- wherein, for said ith task, said decomposition said decomposition of {tilde over (X)}ij in different tasks shares the same feature encoding matrix Ri;
- wherein for said label correlations, said labels share the same label encoding matrix CY across different tasks;
- and instance clusters and label clusters.
- wherein Mij models the correlation between instance clusters and feature clusters, and wherein MiY, models the correlation between instance clusters and label clusters.