SWIFT: Scalable Wasserstein Factorization for Sparse Nonnegative Tensors

Authors

  • Ardavan Afshar Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
  • Kejing Yin Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China
  • Sherry Yan Research Development & Dissemination, Sutter Health, Walnut Creek, USA
  • Cheng Qian Analytic Center of Excellence, IQVIA, Cambridge, USA
  • Joyce Ho Department of Computer Science, Emory University, Atlanta, USA
  • Haesun Park Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA
  • Jimeng Sun Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i8.16811

Keywords:

Matrix & Tensor Methods

Abstract

Existing tensor factorization methods assume that the input tensor follows some specific distribution (i.e. Poisson, Bernoulli, and Gaussian), and solve the factorization by minimizing some empirical loss functions defined based on the corresponding distribution. However, it suffers from several drawbacks: 1) In reality, the underlying distributions are complicated and unknown, making it infeasible to be approximated by a simple distribution. 2) The correlation across dimensions of the input tensor is not well utilized, leading to sub-optimal performance. Although heuristics were proposed to incorporate such correlation as side information under Gaussian distribution, they can not easily be generalized to other distributions. Thus, a more principled way of utilizing the correlation in tensor factorization models is still an open challenge. Without assuming any explicit distribution, we formulate the tensor factorization as an optimal transport problem with Wasserstein distance, which can handle non-negative inputs. We introduce SWIFT, which minimizes the Wasserstein distance that measures the distance between the input tensor and that of the reconstruction. In particular, we define the N-th order tensor Wasserstein loss for the widely used tensor CP factorization and derive the optimization algorithm that minimizes it. By leveraging sparsity structure and different equivalent formulations for optimizing computational efficiency, SWIFT is as scalable as other well-known CP algorithms. Using the factor matrices as features, SWIFT achieves up to 9.65% and 11.31% relative improvement over baselines for downstream prediction tasks. Under the noisy conditions, SWIFT achieves up to 15% and 17% relative improvements over the best competitors for the prediction tasks.

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Published

2021-05-18

How to Cite

Afshar, A., Yin, K., Yan, S., Qian, C., Ho, J., Park, H., & Sun, J. (2021). SWIFT: Scalable Wasserstein Factorization for Sparse Nonnegative Tensors. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 35(8), 6548-6556. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v35i8.16811

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Machine Learning I