070dbb6024b5ef93784428afc71f2146-AuthorFeedback.pdf

We thank three reviewers for the constructive comments. In what follows we make a few clarifications and itemized responses. We are the first to bring the perspective of NMF/topic modeling to Markov state aggregation. We hope our work would inspire future work and more efficient methods may be developed. Making this idea work, both in theory and in applications, requires substantial efforts and nontrivial analysis.