In applications where the tensor rank decomposition arises, one often relies
on its identifiability properties for interpreting the individual rank-1
terms appearing in the decomposition. Several criteria for identifiability have
been proposed in the literature, however few results exist on how frequently
they are satisfied. We propose to call a criterion effective if it is satisfied
on a dense, open subset of the smallest semi-algebraic set enclosing the set of
rank-r tensors. We analyze the effectiveness of Kruskal's criterion when it
is combined with reshaping. It is proved that this criterion is effective for
both real and complex tensors in its entire range of applicability, which is
usually much smaller than the smallest typical rank. Our proof explains when
reshaping-based algorithms for computing tensor rank decompositions may be
expected to recover the decomposition. Specializing the analysis to symmetric
tensors or forms reveals that the reshaped Kruskal criterion may even be
effective up to the smallest typical rank for some third, fourth and sixth
order symmetric tensors of small dimension as well as for binary forms of
degree at least three. We extended this result to 4×4×4×4 symmetric tensors by analyzing the Hilbert function, resulting in a
criterion for symmetric identifiability that is effective up to symmetric rank
8, which is optimal.Comment: 31 pages, 2 Macaulay2 code
