  We consider factoring low-rank tensors in the presence of outlying slabs.
This problem is important in practice, because data collected in many
real-world applications, such as speech, fluorescence, and some social network
data, fit this paradigm. Prior work tackles this problem by iteratively
selecting a fixed number of slabs and fitting, a procedure which may not
converge. We formulate this problem from a group-sparsity promoting point of
view, and propose an alternating optimization framework to handle the
corresponding $\ell_p$ ($0<p\leq 1$) minimization-based low-rank tensor
factorization problem. The proposed algorithm features a similar per-iteration
complexity as the plain trilinear alternating least squares (TALS) algorithm.
Convergence of the proposed algorithm is also easy to analyze under the
framework of alternating optimization and its variants. In addition,
regularization and constraints can be easily incorporated to make use of
\emph{a priori} information on the latent loading factors. Simulations and real
data experiments on blind speech separation, fluorescence data analysis, and
social network mining are used to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm.
