Perturbation Bounds for Orthogonally Decomposable Tensors and Their Applications in High Dimensional Data Analysis

We develop deterministic perturbation bounds for singular values and vectors of orthogonally decomposable tensors, in a spirit similar to classical results for matrices. Our bounds exhibit intriguing differences between matrices and higher-order tensors. Most notably, they indicate that for higher-order tensors perturbation affects each singular value/vector in isolation. In particular, its effect on a singular vector does not depend on the multiplicity of its corresponding singular value or its distance from other singular values. Our results can be readily applied and provide a unified treatment to many different problems involving higher-order orthogonally decomposable tensors. In particular, we illustrate the implications of our bounds through three connected yet seemingly different high dimensional data analysis tasks: tensor SVD, tensor regression and estimation of latent variable models, leading to new insights in each of these settings.