Tensor Deflation for CANDECOMP/PARAFAC— Part I: Alternating Subspace Update Algorithm

CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) approximates multiway data by sum of rank-1 tensors. Unlike matrix decomposition, the procedure which estimates the best rank- R tensor approximation through R sequential best rank-1 approximations does not work for tensors, because the deflation does not always reduce the tensor rank. In this paper, we propose a novel deflation method for the problem. When one factor matrix of a rank- R CP decomposition is of full column rank, the decomposition can be performed through (R-1) rank-1 reductions. At each deflation stage, the residue tensor is constrained to have a reduced multilinear rank. For decomposition of order-3 tensors of size R×R×R and rank- R, estimation of one rank-1 tensor has a computational cost of O(R³) per iteration which is lower than the cost O(R⁴) of the ALS algorithm for the overall CP decomposition. The method can be extended to tracking one or a few rank-one tensors of slow changes, or inspect variations of common patterns in individual datasets.