Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Higher-order multiway data is ubiquitous in machine learning and statistics and often exhibits community-like structures, where each component (node) along each different mode has a community membership associated with it. In this talk we propose the tensor mixed-membership blockmodel, a generalization of the tensor blockmodel positing that memberships need not be discrete, but instead are convex combinations of latent communities. We first study the problem of estimating community memberships, and we show that a tensor generalization of a matrix algorithm can consistently estimate communities at a rate that improves relative to the matrix setting, provided one takes the tensor structure into account. Next, we study the problem of testing whether two nodes have the same community memberships, and we show that a tensor analogue of a matrix test statistic can yield consistent testing with a tighter local power guarantee relative to the matrix setting. If time permits we will also examine the performance of our estimation procedure on flight data. This talk is based on two recent works with Anru Zhang.