This survey provides an overview of higher-order tensor decompositions, their applications, and available software. A tensor is a multidimensional or N -way array. Decompositions of higher-order tensors (i.e., N -way arrays with N ≥ 3) have applications in psychometrics, chemometrics, signal processing, numerical linear algebra, computer vision, numerical analysis, data mining, neuroscience, graph analysis, etc. Two particular tensor decompositions can be considered to be higher-order extensions of the matrix singular value decompo- sition: CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposes a tensor as a sum of rank-one tensors, and the Tucker decomposition is a higher-order form of principal components analysis. There are many other tensor decompositions, including INDSCAL, PARAFAC2, CANDELINC, DEDICOM, and PARATUCK2 as well as nonnegative variants of all of the above. The N-way Toolbox and Tensor Toolbox, both for MATLAB, and the Multilinear Engine are examples of software packages for working with tensors.

There has been continued interest in seeking a theorem describing optimal low-rank approximations to tensors of order 3 or higher, that parallels the Eckart–Young theorem for matrices. In this paper, we argue that the naive approach to this problem is doomed to failure because, unlike matrices, tensors of order 3 or higher can fail to have best rank-r approximations. The phenomenon is much more widespread than one might suspect: examples of this failure can be constructed over a wide range of dimensions, orders and ranks, regardless of the choice of norm (or even Brègman divergence). Moreover, we show that in many instances these counterexamples have positive volume: they cannot be regarded as isolated phenomena. In one extreme case, we exhibit a tensor space in which no rank-3 tensor has an optimal rank-2 approximation. The notable exceptions to this misbehavior are rank-1 tensors and order-2 tensors (i.e. matrices). In a more positive spirit, we propose a natural way of overcoming the ill-posedness of the low-rank approximation problem, by using weak solutions when true solutions do not exist. For this to work, it is necessary to characterize the set of weak solutions, and we do this in the case of rank 2, order 3 (in arbitrary dimensions). In our work we emphasize the importance of closely studying concrete low-dimensional examples as a first step towards more general results. To this end, we present a detailed analysis of equivalence classes of 2 × 2 × 2 tensors, and we develop methods for extending results upwards to higher orders and dimensions. Finally, we link our work to existing studies of tensors from an algebraic geometric point of view. The rank of a tensor can in theory be given a semialgebraic description; in other words, can be determined by a system of polynomial inequalities. We study some of these polynomials in cases of interest to us; in particular we make extensive use of the hyperdeterminant ∆ on R 2×2×2.

This work considers a computationally and statistically efficient parameter estimation method for a wide class of latent variable models—including Gaussian mixture models, hidden Markov models, and latent Dirichlet allocation—which exploits a certain tensor structure in their low-order observable moments (typically, of second- and third-order). Specifically, parameter estimation is reduced to the problem of extracting a certain (orthog-onal) decomposition of a symmetric tensor derived from the moments; this decomposition can be viewed as a natural generalization of the singular value decomposition for matrices. Although tensor decompositions are generally intractable to compute, the decomposition of these specially structured tensors can be efficiently obtained by a variety of approaches, including power iterations and maximization approaches (similar to the case of matrices). A detailed analysis of a robust tensor power method is provided, establishing an analogue of Wedin’s perturbation theorem for the singular vectors of matrices. This implies a ro-bust and computationally tractable estimation approach for several popular latent variable models.

The idea that one might extend numerical linear algebra, the collection of matrix computational methods that form the workhorse of scientific and engineering computing, to numerical multilinear algebra, an analogous collection of tools involving hypermatrices/tensors, appears very promising and has attracted a lot of attention recently. We examine here the computational tractability of some core problems in numerical multilinear algebra. We show that tensor analogues of several standard problems that are readily computable in the matrix (i.e. 2-tensor) case are NP hard. Our list here includes: determining the feasibility of a system of bilinear equations, determining an eigenvalue, a singular value, or the spectral norm of a 3-tensor, determining a best rank-1 approximation to a 3-tensor, determining the rank of a 3-tensor over R or C. Hence making tensor computations feasible is likely to be a challenge.

We consider the problem of determining the symmetric tensor rank for symmetric tensors with an algebraic geometry approach. We give algorithms for computing the symmetric rank for 2 × · · · × 2 tensors and for tensors of small border rank. From a geometric point of view, we describe the symmetric rank strata for some secant varieties of Veronese varieties.

Abstract. We study the decomposition of a nonnegative tensor into a minimal sum of outer product of nonnegative vectors and the associated parsimonious naïve Bayes probabilistic model. We show that the corresponding approximation problem, which is central to nonnegative parafac, will always have optimal solutions. The result holds for any choice of norms and, under a mild assumption, even Brègman divergences. hal-00410056, version 1- 16 Aug 2009 1. Dedication This article is dedicated to the memory of our late colleague Richard Allan Harshman. It is loosely organized around two of Harshman’s best known works — parafac [19] and lsi [13], and answers two questions that he posed. We target this article to a technometrics readership. In Section 4, we discussed a few aspects of nonnegative tensor factorization and Hofmann’s plsi, a variant of the lsi model co-proposed by Harshman [13]. In Section 5, we answered a question of Harshman on why the apparently unrelated construction of Bini, Capovani, Lotti, and Romani in [1] should be regarded as the first example of what he called ‘parafac degeneracy ’ [27]. Finally in Section 6, we showed that such parafac degeneracy will not happen for nonnegative approximations of nonnegative tensors, answering another question of his. 2.

Abstract. Recent work on eigenvalues and eigenvectors for tensors of order m ≥ 3 has been motivated by applications in blind source separation, magnetic resonance imaging, molecular conformation, and more. In this paper, we consider methods for computing real symmetric-tensor eigenpairs of the form Axm−1 = λx subject to ‖x ‖ = 1, which is closely related to optimal rank-1 approximation of a symmetric tensor. Our contribution is a novel shifted symmetric higher-order power method (SS-HOPM), which we show is guaranteed to converge to a tensor eigenpair. SS-HOPM can be viewed as a generalization of the power iteration method for matrices or of the symmetric higherorder power method. Additionally, using fixed point analysis, we can characterize exactly which eigenpairs can and cannot be found by the method. Numerical examples are presented, including examples from an extension of the method to finding complex eigenpairs. Key words. tensor eigenvalues, E-eigenpairs, Z-eigenpairs, l2-eigenpairs, rank-1 approximation, symmetric higher-order power method (S-HOPM), shifted symmetric higher-order power method

This work was originally motivated by a classification of tensors proposed by Richard Harshman. In particular, we focus on simple and multiple “bottlenecks”, and on “swamps”. Existing theoretical results are surveyed, some numerical algorithms are described in details, and their numerical complexity is calculated. In particular, the interest in using the ELS enhancement in these algorithms is discussed. Computer simulations feed this discussion.

We present an algorithm for decomposing a symmetric tensor of dimension n and order d as a sum of of rank-1 symmetric tensors, extending the algorithm of Sylvester devised in 1886 for symmetric tensors of dimension 2. We exploit the known fact that every symmetric tensor is equivalently represented by a homogeneous polynomial in n variables of total degree d. Thus the decomposition corresponds to a sum of powers of linear forms. The impact of this contribution is two-fold. First it permits an efficient computation of the decomposition of any tensor of sub-generic rank, as opposed to widely used iterative algorithms with unproved convergence (e.g. Alternate Least Squares or gradient descents). Second, it gives tools for understanding uniqueness conditions, and for detecting the tensor rank.

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