MACH: Fast Randomized Tensor Decompositions

Abstract: Tensors naturally model many real world processes which generate multi-aspect data. Such processes appear in many different research disciplines, e.g, chemometrics, computer vision, psychometrics and neuroimaging analysis. Tensor decompositions such as the Tucker decomposition are used to analyze multi-aspect data and extract latent factors, which capture the multilinear data structure. Such decompositions are powerful mining tools, for extracting patterns from large data volumes. However, most frequently used algorithms for such decompositions involve the computationally expensive Singular Value Decomposition. In this paper we propose MACH, a new sampling algorithm to compute such decompositions. Our method is of significant practical value for tensor streams, such as environmental monitoring systems, IP traffic matrices over time, where large amounts of data are accumulated and the analysis is computationally intensive but also in "post-mortem" data analysis cases where the tensor does not fit in the available memory. We provide the theoretical analysis of our proposed method, and verify its efficacy in monitoring system applications.