FRAPPE: fast rank approximation with explainable features for tensors

Abstract Tensor decompositions have proven to be effective in analyzing the structure of multidimensional data. However, most of these methods require a key parameter: the number of desired components. In the case of the CANDECOMP/PARAFAC decomposition (CPD), the ideal value for the number of components is known as the canonical rank and greatly affects the quality of the decomposition results. Existing methods use heuristics or Bayesian methods to estimate this value by repeatedly calculating the CPD, making them extremely computationally expensive. In this work, we propose FRAPPE , the first method to estimate the canonical rank of a tensor without having to compute the CPD. This method is the result of two key ideas. First, it is much cheaper to generate synthetic data with known rank compared to computing the CPD. Second, we can greatly improve the generalization ability and speed of our model by generating synthetic data that matches a given input tensor in terms of size and sparsity. We can then train a specialized single-use regression model on a synthetic set of tensors engineered to match a given input tensor and use that to estimate the canonical rank of the tensor—all without computing the expensive CPD. FRAPPE is over $$24\times $$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>24</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> faster than the best-performing baseline, and exhibits a $$10\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> improvement in MAPE on a synthetic dataset. It also performs as well as or better than the baselines on real-world datasets.