We consider the problem of jointly modeling and clustering populations of tensors by introducing a flexible high-dimensional tensor mixture model with heterogeneous covariances. The proposed mixture model exploits the intrinsic structures of tensor data, and is assumed to have means that are low-rank and internally sparse as well as heterogeneous covariances that are separable and conditionally sparse. We develop an efficient high-dimensional expectation-conditional-maximization (HECM) algorithm that breaks the challenging optimization in the M-step into several simpler conditional optimization problems, each of which is convex, admits regularization and has closed-form updating formulas. We show that the proposed HECM algorithm, with an appropriate initialization, converges geometrically to a neighborhood that is within statistical precision of the true parameter. Such a theoretical analysis is highly nontrivial due to the dual non-convexity arising from both the EM-type estimation and the non-convex objective function in the M-step. The efficacy of our proposed method is demonstrated through simulation studies and an application to an autism spectrum disorder study, where our analysis identifies important brain regions for diagnosis.
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