Decompositions of a Higher-Order Tensor in Block Terms—Part I: Lemmas for Partitioned Matrices

In this paper we study a generalization of Kruskal's permutation lemma to partitioned matrices. We define the k'-rank of partitioned matrices as a generalization of the k-rank of matrices. We derive a lower-bound on the k'-rank of Khatri–Rao products of partitioned matrices. We prove that Khatri–Rao products of partitioned matrices are generically full column rank.