To explore multi-way data, different methods have been proposed. Here, we study the popular PARAFAC (Parallel factor analysis) model, which expresses multi-way data in a more compact way, without ignoring the underlying complex structure. To estimate the score and loading matrices, an alternating least squares procedure is typically used. It is however well known that least squares techniques s...

This paper compares ordinary least squares (OLS), weighted least squares (WLS), and adaptive least squares (ALS) by means of a Monte Carlo study and an application to two empirical data sets. Overall, ALS emerges as the winner: It achieves most or even all of the efficiency gains of WLS over OLS when WLS outperforms OLS, but it only has very limited downside risk compared to OLS when OLS outper...