Identifiability of Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions -- Part I: Theory

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Main Authors: Saha, Subhayan, Barbarino, Giovanni, Gillis, Nicolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Saha, Subhayan
Barbarino, Giovanni
Gillis, Nicolas
author_facet Saha, Subhayan
Barbarino, Giovanni
Gillis, Nicolas
contents Tensor decompositions have become a central tool in data science, with applications in areas such as data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. A key property of many tensor decompositions, such as the canonical polyadic decomposition, is identifiability: the factors are unique, up to trivial scaling and permutation ambiguities. This allows one to recover the groundtruth sources that generated the data. The Tucker decomposition (TD) is a central and widely used tensor decomposition model. However, it is in general not identifiable. In this paper, we study the identifiability of the nonnegative TD (nTD). By adapting and extending identifiability results of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), we provide uniqueness results for nTD. Our results require the nonnegative matrix factors to have some degree of sparsity (namely, satisfy the separability condition, or the sufficiently scattered condition), while the core tensor only needs to have some slices (or linear combinations of them) or unfoldings with full column rank (but does not need to be nonnegative). Under such conditions, we derive several procedures, using either unfoldings or slices of the input tensor, to obtain identifiable nTDs by minimizing the volume of unfoldings or slices of the core tensor.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_12713
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifiability of Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions -- Part I: Theory
Saha, Subhayan
Barbarino, Giovanni
Gillis, Nicolas
Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Tensor decompositions have become a central tool in data science, with applications in areas such as data analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. A key property of many tensor decompositions, such as the canonical polyadic decomposition, is identifiability: the factors are unique, up to trivial scaling and permutation ambiguities. This allows one to recover the groundtruth sources that generated the data. The Tucker decomposition (TD) is a central and widely used tensor decomposition model. However, it is in general not identifiable. In this paper, we study the identifiability of the nonnegative TD (nTD). By adapting and extending identifiability results of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), we provide uniqueness results for nTD. Our results require the nonnegative matrix factors to have some degree of sparsity (namely, satisfy the separability condition, or the sufficiently scattered condition), while the core tensor only needs to have some slices (or linear combinations of them) or unfoldings with full column rank (but does not need to be nonnegative). Under such conditions, we derive several procedures, using either unfoldings or slices of the input tensor, to obtain identifiable nTDs by minimizing the volume of unfoldings or slices of the core tensor.
title Identifiability of Nonnegative Tucker Decompositions -- Part I: Theory
topic Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12713