  We provide guarantees for learning latent variable models emphasizing on the
overcomplete regime, where the dimensionality of the latent space can exceed
the observed dimensionality. In particular, we consider multiview mixtures,
spherical Gaussian mixtures, ICA, and sparse coding models. We provide tight
concentration bounds for empirical moments through novel covering arguments. We
analyze parameter recovery through a simple tensor power update algorithm. In
the semi-supervised setting, we exploit the label or prior information to get a
rough estimate of the model parameters, and then refine it using the tensor
method on unlabeled samples. We establish that learning is possible when the
number of components scales as $k=o(d^{p/2})$, where $d$ is the observed
dimension, and $p$ is the order of the observed moment employed in the tensor
method. Our concentration bound analysis also leads to minimax sample
complexity for semi-supervised learning of spherical Gaussian mixtures. In the
unsupervised setting, we use a simple initialization algorithm based on SVD of
the tensor slices, and provide guarantees under the stricter condition that
$k\le \beta d$ (where constant $\beta$ can be larger than $1$), where the
tensor method recovers the components under a polynomial running time (and
exponential in $\beta$). Our analysis establishes that a wide range of
overcomplete latent variable models can be learned efficiently with low
computational and sample complexity through tensor decomposition methods.
