  We propose a generative model for robust tensor factorization in the presence
of both missing data and outliers. The objective is to explicitly infer the
underlying low-CP-rank tensor capturing the global information and a sparse
tensor capturing the local information (also considered as outliers), thus
providing the robust predictive distribution over missing entries. The
low-CP-rank tensor is modeled by multilinear interactions between multiple
latent factors on which the column sparsity is enforced by a hierarchical
prior, while the sparse tensor is modeled by a hierarchical view of Student-$t$
distribution that associates an individual hyperparameter with each element
independently. For model learning, we develop an efficient closed-form
variational inference under a fully Bayesian treatment, which can effectively
prevent the overfitting problem and scales linearly with data size. In contrast
to existing related works, our method can perform model selection automatically
and implicitly without need of tuning parameters. More specifically, it can
discover the groundtruth of CP rank and automatically adapt the sparsity
inducing priors to various types of outliers. In addition, the tradeoff between
the low-rank approximation and the sparse representation can be optimized in
the sense of maximum model evidence. The extensive experiments and comparisons
with many state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets
demonstrate the superiorities of our method from several perspectives.
