Poisson tensor completion with transformed correlated total variation regularization

Tensor completion involves recovering the underlying tensor from partial observations, and in this paper we focus on the point that these observations obey the Poisson distribution. To contend with this problem, we adopt a popular method that minimizes the sum of the data-fitting term and the regularization term under a uniform sampling mechanism. Specifically, we consider the negative logarithmic maximum likelihood estimate of the Poisson distribution as the data-fitting term. To effectively characterize the intrinsic structure of the tensor data, we propose a parameter-free regularization term that can simultaneously capture the low rankness and local smoothness of the underlying tensor. Here, the transformed tensor nuclear norm is used to explore the low rankness under suitable unitary transformations. We present theoretical derivations to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model. Furthermore, we develop an algorithm based on the alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) to efficiently solve the proposed optimization problem, with its overall convergence being established. A series of numerical experiments show that proposed model yields a pleasing accuracy over several state-of-the-art models.