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Section: New Results

Recent results on tensor decompositions

Multi-linear algebra is defined as the algebra of q-way arrays (q>2), that is, the arrays whose elements are addressed by more than two indices. The first works back as far as Jordan who was interested in simultaneously diagonalizing two matrices at a time [96] . It is noteworthy that such two matrices can be interpreted as both slices of a three-way array and their joint diagonalization can be viewed as Hitchcock's polyadic decomposition [92] of the associated three-way array. Other works followed discussing rank problems related to multi-way structures and properties of multi-way arrays. However, these exercices in multilinear algebra were not linked to real data analysis but stayed within the realm of mathematics. Studying three-way data really started with Tucker's seminal work, which gave birth to the three-mode factor analysis [114] . His model is now often referred to as the Tucker3 model. At the same moment, other authors focused on a particular case of the Tucker3 model, calling it PARAFAC for PARAllel FACtor analysis [91] , and on the means to achieve such a decomposition, which will become the famous canonical decomposition [74] . In honor to Hitchcock's pionneer work, we will call it the Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition.

Achieving a CP decomposition has been seen first as a mere non-linear least squares problem, with a simple objective criterion. In fact, the objective is a polynomial function of many variables, where some separate. One could think that this kind of objective is easy because smooth, and even infinitely differentiable. But it turns out that things are much more complicated than they may appear to be at first glance. Nevertheless, the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm has been mostly utilized to address this minimization problem, because of its programming simplicity. This should not hide the inherently complicated theory that lies behind the optimization problem. Moreover, in most of the applications, actual tensors may not exactly satisfy the expected model, so that the problem is eventually an approximation rather than an exact decomposition. This may results in a slow convergence (or lack of convergence) of iterative algorithms such as the ALS one [98] . Consequently, a new class of efficient algorithms able to take into account the properties of tensors to be decomposed is needed.

CP decomposition of semi-symmetric semi-nonnegative three-way arrays

Participant : Laurent Albera.

Main collaboration (Line search and trust region strategies): Julie Coloigner (LTSI, France), Amar Kachenoura (LTSI, France), Lotfi Senhadji (LTSI, France)

Main collaborations (Jacobi-like approaches): Lu Wang (LTSI, France), Amar Kachenoura (LTSI, France), Lotfi Senhadji (LTSI, France), Huazhong Shu (LIST, China)

We proposed new algorithms for the CP decomposition of semi-nonnegative semi-symmetric three-way tensors. In fact, it consists in fitting the CP model for which two of the three loading matrices are nonnegative and equal. Note that such a problem can also be interpreted as a nonnegative Joint Diagonalization by Congruence (JDC) problem.

Line search and trust region strategies

We first circumvented the nonnegativity constraint by means of changes of variable into squares, leading to a (polynomial) unconstrained optimization problem. Two optimization strategies, namely line search and trust region, were then studied. Regarding the former, a global plane search scheme was considered. It consists in computing, for a given direction, one or two optimal stepsizes, depending on whether the same stepsize is used in various updating rules. Moreover, we provided a compact matrix form for the derivatives of the objective function. This allows for a direct implementation of several iterative algorithms such as Conjugate Gradient (CG), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) and Newton-like methods, in matrix programming environments like MATLAB. Note that the computational complexity issue was taken into account in the design phase of the algorithms, and was evaluated for each algorithm, allowing to fairly compare their performance.

Thus, various scenarios have been considered, aiming at testing the influence of  i) an additive noise, which can stand for modeling errors,  ii) the collinearity between factors,  iii) the array rank and  iv) the data size. The comparisons between our CG-like, Newton-like and LM-like methods (where semi-nonnegativity and semi-symmetry constraints are exploited), and classical CP algorithms (where no constraints are considered), showed that a better CP decomposition is obtained when these a priori are exploited, especially in the context of high dimensions and high collinearity. Finally, based on our numerical analysis, the algorithms that seem to yield the best tradeoff between accuracy and complexity are our CG2 steps -like and LM-like algorithms. This work was published in the Elsevier Linear Algebra and Applications journal [19] .

Next, we considered an exponential change of variable leading to a different (non-polynomial) unconstrained optimization problem. Then we proposed novel algorithms based on line search strategy with an analytic global plane search procedure requiring new matrix derivations. Their performance was evaluated in terms of estimation accuracy and computational complexity. The classical ELS-ALS [108] and LM [112] algorithms without symmetry and nonnegativity constraints, and the ACDC algorithm [115] where only the semi-symmetry constraint is imposed, were tested as reference methods. Furthermore, the performance was also compared with our algorithms based on a square change of variable. The comparison studies showed that, among these approaches, the best accuracy/complexity trade off was achieved when an exponential change of variable was used through our ELS-ALS-like algorithm. This work was published in the Elsevier Signal Processing journal [18] .

Jacobi-like approaches

The line search (despite the use of global plane search procedures) and trust region strategies may be sensitive to initialization, and generally require a multi-initialization procedure. In order to circumvent this drawback, we considered in this work Jacobi-like approaches, which are known to be less sensitive to initialization. Note that our line search and trust region approaches can then be used to refine the solution obtained by the latter.

More particularly, we formulated the high-dimensional optimization problem into several sequential polynomial and rational subproblems using  i) a square change of variables to impose nonnegativity and  ii) LU or QR matrix factorization for parameterization. The two equal nonnegative loading matrices are actually written as the Hadamard product of two equal matrices which can be factorized as the product of elementary matrices, each one depending on only one parameter.

The proposed approach reduces the optimization problem to the computation of the two equal nonnegative loading matrices only. The third loading matrix is algebraically derived from the latter. This requires an appropriate parameterization of the set of matrices whose inverse is nonnegative. This work was published in a journal paper [26] . Numerical experiments on simulated matrices emphasize the advantages of the proposed algorithms over classical CP and JDC techniques, especially in the case of degeneracies.