Adaptive Algorithms to Track the PARAFAC Decomposition of a Third-Order Tensor

The PARAFAC decomposition of a higher-order tensor is a powerful multilinear algebra tool that becomes more and more popular in a number of disciplines. Existing PARAFAC algorithms are computationally demanding and operate in batch mode - both serious drawbacks for on-line applications. When the data are serially acquired, or the underlying model changes with time, adaptive PARAFAC algorithms that can track the sought decomposition at low complexity would be highly desirable. This is a challenging task that has not been addressed in the literature, and the topic of this paper. Given an estimate of the PARAFAC decomposition of a tensor at instant t, we propose two adaptive algorithms to update the decomposition at instant t+1, the new tensor being obtained from the old one after appending a new slice in the 'time' dimension. The proposed algorithms can yield estimation performance that is very close to that obtained via repeated application of state-of-art batch algorithms, at orders of magnitude lower complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is illustrated using a MIMO radar application (tracking of directions of arrival and directions of departure) as an example.