Volume-regularized Nonnegative Tucker Decomposition with Identifiability Guarantees

It is well-known that the Tucker decomposition of a multi-dimensional tensor is not unique, because its factors are subject to rotation ambiguities similar to matrix factorization models. Inspired by the recent success in the identifiability of nonnegative matrix factorization, the goal of this work is to achieve similar results for nonnegative Tucker decomposition (NTD). We propose to add a matrix volume regularization as the identifiability criterion, and show that NTD is indeed identifiable if all of the Tucker factors satisfy the sufficiently scattered condition. We then derive an algorithm to solve the modified formulation of NTD that minimizes the generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence of the approximation plus the proposed matrix volume regularization. Numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method.