Compact Decomposition of Irregular Tensors for Data Compression: From Sparse to Dense to High-Order Tensors

An irregular tensor is a collection of matrices with different numbers of rows. Real-world data from diverse domains, including medical and stock data, are effectively represented as irregular tensors due to the inherent variations in data length. For their analysis, various tensor decomposition methods (e.g., PARAFAC2) have been devised. While they are expected to be effective in compressing large-scale irregular tensors, akin to regular tensor decomposition methods, our analysis reveals that their compression performance is limited due to the larger number of first mode factor matrices.