Guarantees for existence of a best canonical polyadic approximation of a noisy low-rank tensor

TL;DR

This paper establishes deterministic bounds for the existence of best low-rank tensor approximations, providing conditions under which the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) is well-posed and unique, especially in noisy settings.

Contribution

It introduces a Frobenius norm ball framework ensuring existence and uniqueness of CPD for tensors near a given tensor, linking tensor approximation to joint generalized eigenvalue problems.

Findings

Existence of best low-rank approximations is guaranteed within a specific Frobenius norm neighborhood.

Tensors with rank greater than border rank are shown to be algebraically and geometrically defective.

Numerical experiments validate the theoretical bounds and the tensor Procrustes problem solutions.

Abstract

The canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) of a low rank tensor plays a major role in data analysis and signal processing by allowing for unique recovery of underlying factors. However, it is well known that the low rank CPD approximation problem is ill-posed. That is, a tensor may fail to have a best rank $R$ CPD approximation when $R>1$. This article gives deterministic bounds for the existence of best low rank tensor approximations over $\mathbb{K}=\mathbb{R}$ or $\mathbb{K}=\mathbb{C}$. More precisely, given a tensor $\mathcal{T} \in \mathbb{K}^{I \times I \times I}$ of rank $R \leq I$, we compute the radius of a Frobenius norm ball centered at $\mathcal{T}$ in which best $\mathbb{K}$-rank $R$ approximations are guaranteed to exist. In addition we show that every $\mathbb{K}$-rank $R$ tensor inside of this ball has a unique canonical polyadic decomposition. This neighborhood may be interpreted as a neighborhood of "mathematical truth" in with CPD approximation and computation is well-posed. In pursuit of these bounds, we describe low rank tensor decomposition as a ``joint generalized eigenvalue" problem. Using this framework, we show that, under mild assumptions, a low rank tensor which has rank strictly greater than border rank is defective in the sense of algebraic and geometric multiplicities for joint generalized eigenvalues. Bounds for existence of best low rank approximations are then obtained by establishing perturbation theoretic results for the joint generalized eigenvalue problem. In this way we establish a connection between existence of best low rank approximations and the tensor spectral norm. In addition we solve a "tensor Procrustes problem" which examines orthogonal compressions for pairs of tensors. The main results of the article are illustrated by a variety of numerical experiments.