Tensor networks have in recent years emerged as the powerful tools for solving the large-scale optimization problems. One of the most popular tensor network is tensor train (TT) decomposition that acts as the building blocks for the complicated tensor networks. However, the TT decomposition highly depends on permutations of tensor dimensions, due to its strictly sequential multilinear products over latent cores, which leads to difficulties in finding the optimal TT representation. In this paper, we introduce a fundamental tensor decomposition model to represent a large dimensional tensor by a circular multilinear products over a sequence of low dimensional cores, which can be graphically interpreted as a cyclic interconnection of 3rd-order tensors, and thus termed as tensor ring (TR) decomposition. The key advantage of TR model is the circular dimensional permutation invariance which is gained by employing the trace operation and treating the latent cores equivalently. TR model can be viewed as a linear combination of TT decompositions, thus obtaining the powerful and generalized representation abilities. For optimization of latent cores, we present four different algorithms based on the sequential SVDs, ALS scheme, and block-wise ALS techniques. Furthermore, the mathematical properties of TR model are investigated, which shows that the basic multilinear algebra can be performed efficiently by using TR representaions and the classical tensor decompositions can be conveniently transformed into the TR representation. Finally, the experiments on both synthetic signals and real-world datasets were conducted to evaluate the performance of different algorithms.
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