SummaryThe widespread use of multi-sensor technology and the emergence of big datasets has highlighted the limitations of standard flat-view matrix models and the necessity to move towards more versatile data analysis tools. We show that higher-order tensors (i.e., multiway arrays) enable such a fundamental paradigm shift towards models that are essentially polynomial and whose uniqueness, unlike the matrix methods, is guaranteed under very mild and natural conditions. Benefiting from the power of multilinear algebra as their mathematical backbone, data analysis techniques using tensor decompositions are shown to have great flexibility in the choice of constraints that match data properties, and to find more general latent components in the data than matrix-based methods. A comprehensive introduction to tensor decompositions is provided from a signal processing perspective, starting from the algebraic foundations, via basic Canonical Polyadic and Tucker models, through to advanced cause-effect and multi-view data analysis schemes. We show that tensor decompositions enable natural generalizations of some commonly used signal processing paradigms, such as canonical correlation and subspace techniques, signal separation, linear regression, feature extraction and classification. We also cover computational aspects, and point out how ideas from compressed sensing and scientific computing may be used for addressing the otherwise unmanageable storage and manipulation problems associated with big datasets. The concepts are supported by illustrative real world case studies illuminating the benefits of the tensor framework, as efficient and promising tools for modern signal processing, data analysis and machine learning applications; these benefits also extend to vector/matrix data through tensorization.

Modern applications in engineering and data science are increasingly based on multidimensional data of exceedingly high volume, variety, and structural richness. However, standard machine learning algorithms typically scale exponentially with data volume and complexity of cross-modal couplings - the so called curse of dimensionality - which is prohibitive to the analysis of large-scale, multi-modal and multi-relational datasets. Given that such data are often efficiently represented as multiway arrays or tensors, it is therefore timely and valuable for the multidisciplinary machine learning and data analytic communities to review low-rank tensor decompositions and tensor networks as emerging tools for dimensionality reduction and large scale optimization problems. Our particular emphasis is on elucidating that, by virtue of the underlying low-rank approximations, tensor networks have the ability to alleviate the curse of dimensionality in a number of applied areas. In Part 1 of this monograph we provide innovative solutions to low-rank tensor network decompositions and easy to interpret graphical representations of the mathematical operations on tensor networks. Such a conceptual insight allows for seamless migration of ideas from the flat-view matrices to tensor network operations and vice versa, and provides a platform for further developments, practical applications, and non-Euclidean extensions. It also permits the introduction of various tensor network operations without an explicit notion of mathematical expressions, which may be beneficial for many research communities that do not directly rely on multilinear algebra. Our focus is on the Tucker and tensor train (TT) decompositions and their extensions, and on demonstrating the ability of tensor networks to provide linearly or even super-linearly (e.g., logarithmically) scalable solutions, as illustrated in detail in Part 2 of this monograph

Abstract-CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor factorization of incomplete data is a powerful technique for tensor completion through explicitly capturing the multilinear latent factors. The existing CP algorithms require the tensor rank to be manually specified, however, the determination of tensor rank remains a challenging problem especially for CP rank. In addition, existing approaches do not take into account uncertainty information of latent factors, as well as missing entries. To address these issues, we formulate CP factorization using a hierarchical probabilistic model and employ a fully Bayesian treatment by incorporating a sparsity-inducing prior over multiple latent factors and the appropriate hyperpriors over all hyperparameters, resulting in automatic rank determination. To learn the model, we develop an efficient deterministic Bayesian inference algorithm, which scales linearly with data size. Our method is characterized as a tuning parameter-free approach, which can effectively infer underlying multilinear factors with a low-rank constraint, while also providing predictive distributions over missing entries. Extensive simulations on synthetic data illustrate the intrinsic capability of our method to recover the ground-truth of CP rank and prevent the overfitting problem, even when a large amount of entries are missing. Moreover, the results from real-world applications, including image inpainting and facial image synthesis, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for both tensor factorization and tensor completion in terms of predictive performance.

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