  We present an approach for penalized tensor decomposition (PTD) that
estimates smoothly varying latent factors in multi-way data. This generalizes
existing work on sparse tensor decomposition and penalized matrix
decompositions, in a manner parallel to the generalized lasso for regression
and smoothing problems. Our approach presents many nontrivial challenges at the
intersection of modeling and computation, which are studied in detail. An
efficient coordinate-wise optimization algorithm for (PTD) is presented, and
its convergence properties are characterized. The method is applied both to
simulated data and real data on flu hospitalizations in Texas. These results
show that our penalized tensor decomposition can offer major improvements on
existing methods for analyzing multi-way data that exhibit smooth spatial or
temporal features.
