Shape Constrained Tensor Decompositions

We propose a new low-rank tensor factorization where one mode is coded as a sparse linear combination of elements from an over-complete library. Our method, Shape Constrained Tensor Decomposition (SCTD) is based upon the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition which produces r-rank approximations of data tensors via outer products of vectors in each dimension of the data. The SCTD model can leverage prior knowledge about the shape of factors along a given mode, for example in tensor data where one mode represents time. By constraining the vector in the temporal dimension to known analytic forms which are selected from a large set of candidate functions, more readily interpretable decompositions are achieved and analytic time dependencies discovered. The SCTD method circumvents traditional flattening techniques where an N-way array is reshaped into a matrix in order to perform a singular value decomposition. A clear advantage of the SCTD algorithm is its ability to extract transient and intermittent phenomena which is often difficult for SVD-based methods. We motivate the SCTD method using several intuitively appealing results before applying it on a real-world data set to illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm in extracting interpretable spatio-temporal modes. With the rise of data-driven discovery methods, the decomposition proposed provides a viable technique for analyzing multitudes of data in a more comprehensible fashion.