Learning from Binary Multiway Data: Probabilistic Tensor Decomposition and its Statistical Optimality

An important reason for such an increase is the effective representation of multiway data using a tensor structure. One example is the recommender system (Bi et al., 2018), which can be naturally described as a three-way tensor of user item context and each entry indicates the user-item interaction. Another example is the DBLP database (Zhe et al., 2016), which is organized into a three-way tensor of author word venue and each entry indicates the co-occurrence of the triplets. Whereas many real-world multiway datasets have continuous-valued entries, there have recently emerged more instances of binary tensors, in which all tensor entries are binary indicators 0/1. Examples include click/no-click action in recommender systems (Sun et al., 2017), multi-relational social networks (Nickel et al., 2011), and brain structural connectivity networks (Wang et al., 2017a). These binary tensors are often noisy and high-dimensional.