L1-Norm Tucker Tensor Decomposition

Tucker decomposition is a standard multi-way generalization of Principal-Component Analysis (PCA), appropriate for processing tensor data. Similar to PCA, Tucker decomposition has been shown to be sensitive against faulty data, due to its L2-norm-based formulation which places squared emphasis to peripheral/outlying entries. In this work, we explore L1-Tucker, an L1-norm based reformulation of Tucker decomposition, and present two algorithms for its solution, namely L1-norm Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition (L1-HOSVD) and L1-norm Higher-Order Orthogonal Iterations (L1-HOOI). The proposed algorithms are accompanied by complexity and convergence analysis. Our numerical studies on tensor reconstruction and classification corroborate that L1-Tucker decomposition, implemented by means of the proposed algorithms, attains similar performance to standard Tucker when the processed data are corruption-free, while it exhibits sturdy resistance against heavily corrupted entries.