We study the statistical problem of estimating a rank-one sparse tensor corrupted by additive Gaussian noise, a model also known as sparse tensor PCA. We show that for Bernoulli and Bernoulli-Rademacher distributed signals and emph{for all} sparsity levels which are sublinear in the dimension of the signal, the sparse tensor PCA model exhibits a phase transition called the emph{all-or-nothing phenomenon}. This is the property that for some signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) $mathrm{SNR_c}$ and any fixed $epsilon>0$, if the SNR of the model is below $left(1-epsilonright)mathrm{SNR_c}$, then it is impossible to achieve any arbitrarily small constant correlation with the hidden signal, while if the SNR is above $left(1+epsilon right)mathrm{SNR_c}$, then it is possible to achieve almost perfect correlation with the hidden signal. The all-or-nothing phenomenon was initially established in the context of sparse linear regression, and over the last year also in the context of sparse 2-tensor (matrix) PCA, Bernoulli group testing, and generalized linear models. Our results follow from a more general result showing that for any Gaussian additive model with a discrete uniform prior, the all-or-nothing phenomenon follows as a direct outcome of an appropriately defined near-orthogonality property of the support of the prior distribution.
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