We study the problem of finding orthogonal low-rank approximations of symmetric tensors. In the case of matrices, the approximation is a truncated singular value decomposition which is then symmetric. Moreover, for rank-one approximations of tensors of any dimension, a classical result proven by Banach in 1938 shows that the optimal approximation can always be chosen to be symmetric. In contrast to these results, this article shows that the corresponding statement is no longer true for orthogonal approximations of higher rank. Specifically, for any of the four common notions of tensor orthogonality used in the literature, we show that optimal orthogonal approximations of rank greater than one cannot always be chosen to be symmetric.
Lastly, the results of this article are related to (but distinct from) Comon's conjecture @cite_13 , which asks if the rank and symmetric rank of a symmetric tensor coincide, i.e., if whenever @math is a symmetric tensor. This conjecture has been proven to be true in many special cases @cite_30 @cite_2 , but is now known to not be true in general @cite_21 . The setting of this article can be seen as an extension of Comon's conjecture to the case of orthogonal approximations of a tensor. This extension differs from Comon's conjecture in two ways. Firstly, we consider approximations in Equation , rather than the exact decompositions in Equation . Secondly, we impose orthogonality constraints on the terms @math in Equation . This drastically changes the nature of the problem, since for instance the approximation problem is ill-posed without orthogonality constraints and well-posed with orthogonality constraints. The status of Comon's conjecture therefore does not have any direct bearing on the extension we consider. Our results show that this extension is not true in general, for any of the common notions of orthogonality of tensors considered in the literature.
@cite_30 @cite_21 @cite_13 @cite_2
2552513246 2132267493 2591592591 2242384245
Comon's Conjecture claims that for a symmetric tensor, its rank and its symmetric rank coincide. We show that this conjecture is true under an additional assumption that the rank of that tensor is not larger than its order. Moreover, if its rank is less than its order, then all rank decompositions are necessarily symmetric rank decompositions. 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- @math 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 Bregman 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 toward more general results. To this end, we present a detailed analysis of equivalence classes of @math tensors, and we develop methods for extending results upward 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, it 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 @math on @math . This paper considers the problem of designing maximum distance separable (MDS) codes over small fields with constraints on the support of their generator matrices. For any given @math binary matrix @math , the GM-MDS conjecture, proposed by , states that if @math satisfies the so-called MDS condition, then for any field @math of size @math , there exists an @math MDS code whose generator matrix @math , with entries in @math , fits the matrix @math (i.e., @math is the support matrix of @math ). Despite all the attempts by the coding theory community, this conjecture remains still open in general. It was shown, independently by and , that the GM-MDS conjecture holds if the following conjecture, referred to as the TM-MDS conjecture, holds: if @math satisfies the MDS condition, then the determinant of a transform matrix @math , such that @math fits @math , is not identically zero, where @math is a Vandermonde matrix with distinct parameters. In this work, we first reformulate the TM-MDS conjecture in terms of the Wronskian determinant, and then present an algebraic-combinatorial approach based on polynomial-degree reduction for proving this conjecture. Our proof technique's strength is based primarily on reducing inherent combinatorics in the proof. We demonstrate the strength of our technique by proving the TM-MDS conjecture for the cases where the number of rows ( @math ) of @math is upper bounded by @math . For this class of special cases of @math where the only additional constraint is on @math , only cases with @math were previously proven theoretically, and the previously used proof techniques are not applicable to cases with @math . Many idealized problems in signal processing, machine learning, and statistics can be reduced to the problem of finding the symmetric canonical decomposition of an underlying symmetric and orthogonally decomposable (SOD) tensor. Drawing inspiration from the matrix case, the successive rank-one approximation (SROA) scheme has been proposed and shown to yield this tensor decomposition exactly, and a plethora of numerical methods have thus been developed for the tensor rank-one approximation problem. In practice, however, the inevitable errors (say) from estimation, computation, and modeling necessitate that the input tensor can only be assumed to be a nearly SOD tensor---i.e., a symmetric tensor slightly perturbed from the underlying SOD tensor. This paper shows that even in the presence of perturbation, SROA can still robustly recover the symmetric canonical decomposition of the underlying tensor. It is shown that when the perturbation error is small enough, the approximation errors do not accumulate with ...