Fast and Accurate Dual-Way Streaming PARAFAC2 for Irregular Tensors -- Algorithm and Application

How can we efficiently and accurately analyze an irregular tensor in a dual-way streaming setting where the sizes of two dimensions of the tensor increase over time? What types of anomalies are there in the dual-way streaming setting? An irregular tensor is a collection of matrices whose column lengths are the same while their row lengths are different. In a dual-way streaming setting, both new rows of existing matrices and new matrices arrive over time. PARAFAC2 decomposition is a crucial tool for analyzing irregular tensors. Although real-time analysis is necessary in the dual-way streaming, static PARAFAC2 decomposition methods fail to efficiently work in this setting since they perform PARAFAC2 decomposition for accumulated tensors whenever new data arrive. Existing streaming PARAFAC2 decomposition methods work in a limited setting and fail to handle new rows of matrices efficiently. In this paper, we propose Dash, an efficient and accurate PARAFAC2 decomposition method working in the dual-way streaming setting. When new data are given, Dash efficiently performs PARAFAC2 decomposition by carefully dividing the terms related to old and new data and avoiding naive computations involved with old data. Furthermore, applying a forgetting factor makes Dash follow recent movements. Extensive experiments show that Dash achieves up to 14.0x faster speed than existing PARAFAC2 decomposition methods for newly arrived data. We also provide discoveries for detecting anomalies in real-world datasets, including Subprime Mortgage Crisis and COVID-19.

Fast Partial Fourier Transform

Given a time series vector, how can we efficiently compute a specified part of Fourier coefficients? Fast Fourier transform (FFT) is a widely used algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform in many machine learning applications. Despite its pervasive use, all known FFT algorithms do not provide a fine-tuning option for the user to specify one's demand, that is, the output size (the number of Fourier coefficients to be computed) is algorithmically determined by the input size. This matters because not every application using FFT requires the whole spectrum of the frequency domain, resulting in an inefficiency due to extra computation. In this paper, we propose a fast Partial Fourier Transform (PFT), a careful modification of the Cooley-Tukey algorithm that enables one to specify an arbitrary consecutive range where the coefficients should be computed. We derive the asymptotic time complexity of PFT with respect to input and output sizes, as well as its numerical accuracy. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art FFT algorithms, with an order of magnitude of speedup for sufficiently small output sizes without sacrificing accuracy.