Singular Vectors of Orthogonally Decomposable Tensors

Orthogonal decomposition of tensors is a generalization of the singular value decomposition of matrices. In this paper, we study the spectral theory of orthogonally decomposable tensors. For such a tensor, we give a description of its singular vector tuples as a variety in a product of projective spaces.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure

Duality of Graphical Models and Tensor Networks

In this article we show the duality between tensor networks and undirected graphical models with discrete variables. We study tensor networks on hypergraphs, which we call tensor hypernetworks. We show that the tensor hypernetwork on a hypergraph exactly corresponds to the graphical model given by the dual hypergraph. We translate various notions under duality. For example, marginalization in a graphical model is dual to contraction in the tensor network. Algorithms also translate under duality. We show that belief propagation corresponds to a known algorithm for tensor network contraction. This article is a reminder that the research areas of graphical models and tensor networks can benefit from interaction

Fixed points of the EM algorithm and nonnegative rank boundaries

Mixtures of $r$ independent distributions for two discrete random variables can be represented by matrices of nonnegative rank $r$. Likelihood inference for the model of such joint distributions leads to problems in real algebraic geometry that are addressed here for the first time. We characterize the set of fixed points of the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, and we study the boundary of the space of matrices with nonnegative rank at most $3$. Both of these sets correspond to algebraic varieties with many irreducible components.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOS1282 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Geometry of Log-Concave Density Estimation

Shape-constrained density estimation is an important topic in mathematical statistics. We focus on densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ that are log-concave, and we study geometric properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for weighted samples. Cule, Samworth, and Stewart showed that the logarithm of the optimal log-concave density is piecewise linear and supported on a regular subdivision of the samples. This defines a map from the space of weights to the set of regular subdivisions of the samples, i.e. the face poset of their secondary polytope. We prove that this map is surjective. In fact, every regular subdivision arises in the MLE for some set of weights with positive probability, but coarser subdivisions appear to be more likely to arise than finer ones. To quantify these results, we introduce a continuous version of the secondary polytope, whose dual we name the Samworth body. This article establishes a new link between geometric combinatorics and nonparametric statistics, and it suggests numerous open problems.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figure

Superresolution without Separation

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of diffraction-limited superresolution, demonstrating that arbitrarily close point sources can be resolved in ideal situations. Precisely, we assume that the incoming signal is a linear combination of M shifted copies of a known waveform with unknown shifts and amplitudes, and one only observes a finite collection of evaluations of this signal. We characterize properties of the base waveform such that the exact translations and amplitudes can be recovered from 2M + 1 observations. This recovery is achieved by solving a a weighted version of basis pursuit over a continuous dictionary. Our methods combine classical polynomial interpolation techniques with contemporary tools from compressed sensing.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure

Convolutions of Totally Positive Distributions with applications to Kernel Density Estimation

In this work we study the estimation of the density of a totally positive random vector. Total positivity of the distribution of a random vector implies a strong form of positive dependence between its coordinates and, in particular, it implies positive association. Since estimating a totally positive density is a non-parametric problem, we take on a (modified) kernel density estimation approach. Our main result is that the sum of scaled standard Gaussian bumps centered at a min-max closed set provably yields a totally positive distribution. Hence, our strategy for producing a totally positive estimator is to form the min-max closure of the set of samples, and output a sum of Gaussian bumps centered at the points in this set. We can frame this sum as a convolution between the uniform distribution on a min-max closed set and a scaled standard Gaussian. We further conjecture that convolving any totally positive density with a standard Gaussian remains totally positive