Abstract

Abstract. We study the decomposition of a nonnegative tensor into a minimal sum of outer product of nonnegative vectors and the associated parsimonious naïve Bayes probabilistic model. We show that the corresponding approximation problem, which is central to nonnegative parafac, will always have optimal solutions. The result holds for any choice of norms and, under a mild assumption, even Brègman divergences. hal-00410056, version 1- 16 Aug 2009 1. Dedication This article is dedicated to the memory of our late colleague Richard Allan Harshman. It is loosely organized around two of Harshman’s best known works — parafac [19] and lsi [13], and answers two questions that he posed. We target this article to a technometrics readership. In Section 4, we discussed a few aspects of nonnegative tensor factorization and Hofmann’s plsi, a variant of the lsi model co-proposed by Harshman [13]. In Section 5, we answered a question of Harshman on why the apparently unrelated construction of Bini, Capovani, Lotti, and Romani in [1] should be regarded as the first example of what he called ‘parafac degeneracy ’ [27]. Finally in Section 6, we showed that such parafac degeneracy will not happen for nonnegative approximations of nonnegative tensors, answering another question of his. 2.

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