Tensor Derivatives, Unified Tensor-Form Differential Equations, and Model Reduction via Partial Tucker Decomposition
This paper develops a unified tensor calculus for matrix-valued functions and their derivatives, and leverages this framework to construct efficient model reduction techniques for high-dimensional tensor differential equations. We first establish a systematic theory of tensor differentiation, wherein the derivative of a matrix with respect to another matrix is represented as a fourth-order tensor. Building on this calculus, we recast linear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and partial differential equations(PDEs) into a compact tensor-matrix form $\frac{dX}{dt} = \A\ast X$. The general solution is expressed as $X = \exp(t\A)\ast C$, extending the matrix exponential to the tensor setting. Conditions under which the solution admits this exponential form are characterized in terms of the commutativity of the associated matrix slices. We introduce the partial Tucker decomposition (parTuckerD) to address the computational challenges posed by high-order tensor systems. On a synthetic electronic health record (EHR) tensor, parTuckerD achieves a relative reconstruction error of $0.0992$ with a $136.3\times$ compression ratio, matching the accuracy of the full TuckerD while preserving patient-level similarity structure. The results demonstrate that the proposed tensor calculus and parTuckerD framework provide a principle and computationally efficient approach for analyzing and solving high-dimensional tensor differential equations arising in data-intensive applications.