The Average Spectrum Norm and Near-Optimal Tensor Completion

We introduce a new tensor norm, the average spectrum norm, to study sample complexity of tensor completion problems based on the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD). Properties of the average spectrum norm and its dual norm are investigated, demonstrating their utility for low-rank tensor recovery analysis. Our novel approach significantly reduces the provable sample rate for CPD-based noisy tensor completion, providing the best bounds to date on the number of observed noisy entries required to produce an arbitrarily accurate estimate of an underlying mean value tensor. Under Poisson and Bernoulli multivariate distributions, we show that an $N$-way CPD rank-$R$ parametric tensor $\boldsymbol{\mathscr{M}}\in\mathbb{R}^{I\times \cdots\times I}$ generating noisy observations can be approximated by large likelihood estimators from $\mathcal{O}(IR^2\log^{N+2}(I))$ revealed entries. Furthermore, under nonnegative and orthogonal versions of the CPD we improve the result to depend linearly on the rank, achieving the near-optimal rate $\mathcal{O}(IR\log^{N+2}(I))$.