Tensor rank estimation and completion via CP-based nuclear norm

Tensor completion (TC) is a challenging problem of recovering missing entries of a tensor from its partial observation. One main TC approach is based on CP/Tucker decomposition. However, this approach often requires the determination of a tensor rank a priori. This rank estimation problem is difficult in practice. Several Bayesian solutions have been proposed but they often under/overestimate the tensor rank while being quite slow. To address this problem of rank estimation with missing entries, we viewthe weight vector of the orthogonal CP decomposition of a tensor to be analogous to the vector of singular values of a matrix. Subsequently, we define a new CP-based tensor nuclear norm as the L1-norm of this weight vector. We then propose Tensor Rank Estimation based on L1-regularized orthogonal CP decomposition (TREL1) for both CP-rank and Tucker-rank. Specifically, we incorporate a regularization with CP-based tensor nuclear norm when minimizing the reconstruction error in TC to automatically determine the rank of an incomplete tensor. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data show that: 1) Given sufficient observed entries, TREL1 can estimate the true rank (both CP-rank and Tucker-rank) of incomplete tensors well; 2) The rank estimated by TREL1 can consistently improve recovery accuracy of decomposition-based TC methods; 3) TREL1 is not sensitive to its parameters in general and more efficient than existing rank estimation methods.