We present an alternative approach to decompose non-negative tensors, called many-body approximation. Traditional decomposition methods assume low-rankness in the representation, resulting in difficulties in global optimization and target rank selection. We avoid these problems by energy-based modeling of tensors, where a tensor and its mode correspond to a probability distribution and a random variable, respectively. Our model can be globally optimized in terms of the KL divergence minimization by taking the interaction between variables (that is, modes), into account that can be tuned more intuitively than ranks. Furthermore, we visualize interactions between modes as tensor networks and reveal a nontrivial relationship between many-body approximation and low-rank approximation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in tensor completion and approximation.

We propose a fast non-gradient-based method of rank-1 non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) for missing data, called A1GM, that minimizes the KL divergence from an input matrix to the reconstructed rank-1 matrix. Our method is based on our new finding of an analytical closed-formula of the best rank-1 non-negative multiple matrix factorization (NMMF), a variety of NMF. NMMF is known to exactly solve NMF for missing data if positions of missing values satisfy a certain condition, and A1GM transforms a given matrix so that the analytical solution to NMMF can be applied. We empirically show that A1GM is more efficient than a gradient method with competitive reconstruction errors.

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; 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 and achieves competitive or better approximation of given tensors.