Suppose my two marginal bases are given by (for variable $p$ and $t$ the degree is equal to $1$ and $5$ inner knots are used).
> bp
p.1 p.2 p.3 p.4 p.5 p.6
[1,] 1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0
[2,] 0 0.75 0.25 0.00 0.00 0
[3,] 0 0.00 0.50 0.50 0.00 0
[4,] 0 0.00 0.00 0.25 0.75 0
[5,] 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1
and
> bt
t.1 t.2 t.3 t.4 t.5 t.6
[1,] 1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0
[2,] 0 0.75 0.25 0.00 0.00 0
[3,] 0 0.00 0.50 0.50 0.00 0
[4,] 0 0.00 0.00 0.25 0.75 0
[5,] 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1
Obviously defining the tensor-product-matrix as $B_i = bp_i\otimes bt_i$ I will get zero columns if, for instance, the elements of the first column of $bp$, i.e., $p.1$ are multiplied with anything which is not the first column of $bt$, i.e., $t.1$.
The problem here is, that I use some quasi-Newton approach for optimization which uses a predefined gradient which involves multiplications with the columns of the tensor matrix $B$.
Hence if there is a zero column, the gradient will be zero at this point and any abitrary parameter value can be used since the procedure will not change this parameter.
In the optimization step, will those columns just be eliminated?