Fast Tucker Rank Reduction for Non-Negative Tensors Using Mean-Field Approximation

We present an efficient low-rank approximation algorithm for non-negative tensors. The algorithm is derived from our two findings: First, we show that rank-1 approximation for tensors can be viewed as a mean-field approximation by treating each tensor as a probability distribution. Second, we theoretically provide a sufficient condition for distribution parameters to reduce Tucker ranks of tensors and, interestingly, this sufficient condition can be achieved by iterative application of the mean-field approximation. Since the mean-field approximation is always given as a closed formula, our findings lead to a fast low-rank approximation algorithm without using a gradient method. We empirically demonstrate that our algorithm is faster than the existing non-negative Tucker rank reduction methods with achieving competitive or better approximation of given tensors.