In this manuscript, we focus on the minimal polyadic decomposition of third order tensors, which is often referred to: “Canonical Polyadic” (CP), “CanDecomp”, or “Parafac”. This decomposition is useful in a very wide panel of applications. However, here, we only address the problem of fluorescence spectroscopy applied to environment data collected in different locations or times. They contain a mixing of several organic components and the goal of the used processing is to separate and estimate these components present in the considered samples. Moreover, in some applications like hyperspectral unmixing or chemometrics, it is useful to constrain the wanted loading matrices to be real and nonnegative, because they represent nonnegative physical data (spectra, abundance fractions, concentrations, etc...). That is the reason why all the algorithms developed here take into account this constraint (the main advantage is to turn the approximation problem into a well-posed one). Some of them rely on methods close to barrier functions, others consist in a parameterization of the loading matrices with the help of squares. Many optimization algorithms were considered: gradient approaches, nonlinear conjugate gradient, that fits well with big dimension problems, Quasi-Newton (BGFS and DFP) and finally Levenberg-Marquardt. Two versions of these algorithms have been considered: “Enhanced Line Search” version (ELS, enabling to escape from local minima) and the “backtracking” version (alternating with ELS).
