Tensor canonical correlation analysis

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a multivariate analysis technique for estimating a linear relationship between two sets of measurements. Modern acquisition technologies, for example, those arising in neuroimaging and remote sensing, produce data in the form of multidimensional arrays or tensors. Classic CCA is not appropriate for dealing with tensor data due to the multidimensional structure and ultrahigh dimensionality of such modern data. In this paper, we present tensor CCA (TCCA) to discover relationships between two tensors while simultaneously preserving multidimensional structure of the tensors and utilizing substantially fewer parameters. Furthermore, we show how to employ a parsimonious covariance structure to gain additional stability and efficiency. We delineate population and sample problems for each model and propose efficient estimation algorithms with global convergence guarantees. Also we describe a probabilistic model for TCCA that enables the generation of synthetic data with desired canonical variates and correlations. Simulation studies illustrate the performance of our methods.