No Arabic abstract
Covariance matrix testing for high dimensional data is a fundamental problem. A large class of covariance test statistics based on certain averaged spectral statistics of the sample covariance matrix are known to obey central limit theorems under the null. However, precise understanding for the power behavior of the corresponding tests under general alternatives remains largely unknown. This paper develops a general method for analyzing the power behavior of covariance test statistics via accurate non-asymptotic power expansions. We specialize our general method to two prototypical settings of testing identity and sphericity, and derive sharp power expansion for a number of widely used tests, including the likelihood ratio tests, Ledoit-Nagao-Wolfs test, Cai-Mas test and Johns test. The power expansion for each of those tests holds uniformly over all possible alternatives under mild growth conditions on the dimension-to-sample ratio. Interestingly, although some of those tests are previously known to share the same limiting power behavior under spiked covariance alternatives with a fixed number of spikes, our new power characterizations indicate that such equivalence fails when many spikes exist. The proofs of our results combine techniques from Poincare-type inequalities, random matrices and zonal polynomials.
We consider testing the equality of two high-dimensional covariance matrices by carrying out a multi-level thresholding procedure, which is designed to detect sparse and faint differences between the covariances. A novel U-statistic composition is developed to establish the asymptotic distribution of the thresholding statistics in conjunction with the matrix blocking and the coupling techniques. We propose a multi-thresholding test that is shown to be powerful in detecting sparse and weak differences between two covariance matrices. The test is shown to have attractive detection boundary and to attain the optimal minimax rate in the signal strength under different regimes of high dimensionality and the sparsity of the signal. Simulation studies are conducted to demonstrate the utility of the proposed test.
Testing large covariance matrices is of fundamental importance in statistical analysis with high-dimensional data. In the past decade, three types of test statistics have been studied in the literature: quadratic form statistics, maximum form statistics, and their weighted combination. It is known that quadratic form statistics would suffer from low power against sparse alternatives and maximum form statistics would suffer from low power against dense alternatives. The weighted combination methods were introduced to enhance the power of quadratic form statistics or maximum form statistics when the weights are appropriately chosen. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to exploit the full potential of quadratic form statistics and maximum form statistics for testing high-dimensional covariance matrices. We propose a scale-invariant power enhancement test based on Fishers method to combine the p-values of quadratic form statistics and maximum form statistics. After carefully studying the asymptotic joint distribution of quadratic form statistics and maximum form statistics, we prove that the proposed combination method retains the correct asymptotic size and boosts the power against more general alternatives. Moreover, we demonstrate the finite-sample performance in simulation studies and a real application.
Robust estimators of large covariance matrices are considered, comprising regularized (linear shrinkage) modifications of Maronnas classical M-estimators. These estimators provide robustness to outliers, while simultaneously being well-defined when the number of samples does not exceed the number of variables. By applying tools from random matrix theory, we characterize the asymptotic performance of such estimators when the numbers of samples and variables grow large together. In particular, our results show that, when outliers are absent, many estimators of the regularized-Maronna type share the same asymptotic performance, and for these estimators we present a data-driven method for choosing the asymptotically optimal regularization parameter with respect to a quadratic loss. Robustness in the presence of outliers is then studied: in the non-regularized case, a large-dimensional robustness metric is proposed, and explicitly computed for two particular types of estimators, exhibiting interesting differences depending on the underlying contamination model. The impact of outliers in regularized estimators is then studied, with interesting differences with respect to the non-regularized case, leading to new practical insights on the choice of particular estimators.
Testing for white noise is a classical yet important problem in statistics, especially for diagnostic checks in time series modeling and linear regression. For high-dimensional time series in the sense that the dimension $p$ is large in relation to the sample size $T$, the popular omnibus tests including the multivariate Hosking and Li-McLeod tests are extremely conservative, leading to substantial power loss. To develop more relevant tests for high-dimensional cases, we propose a portmanteau-type test statistic which is the sum of squared singular values of the first $q$ lagged sample autocovariance matrices. It, therefore, encapsulates all the serial correlations (upto the time lag $q$) within and across all component series. Using the tools from random matrix theory and assuming both $p$ and $T$ diverge to infinity, we derive the asymptotic normality of the test statistic under both the null and a specific VMA(1) alternative hypothesis. As the actual implementation of the test requires the knowledge of three characteristic constants of the population cross-sectional covariance matrix and the value of the fourth moment of the standardized innovations, non trivial estimations are proposed for these parameters and their integration leads to a practically usable test. Extensive simulation confirms the excellent finite-sample performance of the new test with accurate size and satisfactory power for a large range of finite $(p,T)$ combinations, therefore ensuring wide applicability in practice. In particular, the new tests are consistently superior to the traditional Hosking and Li-McLeod tests.
Let $mathbf{X}_n=(x_{ij})$ be a $k times n$ data matrix with complex-valued, independent and standardized entries satisfying a Lindeberg-type moment condition. We consider simultaneously $R$ sample covariance matrices $mathbf{B}_{nr}=frac1n mathbf{Q}_r mathbf{X}_n mathbf{X}_n^*mathbf{Q}_r^top,~1le rle R$, where the $mathbf{Q}_{r}$s are nonrandom real matrices with common dimensions $ptimes k~(kgeq p)$. Assuming that both the dimension $p$ and the sample size $n$ grow to infinity, the limiting distributions of the eigenvalues of the matrices ${mathbf{B}_{nr}}$ are identified, and as the main result of the paper, we establish a joint central limit theorem for linear spectral statistics of the $R$ matrices ${mathbf{B}_{nr}}$. Next, this new CLT is applied to the problem of testing a high dimensional white noise in time series modelling. In experiments the derived test has a controlled size and is significantly faster than the classical permutation test, though it does have lower power. This application highlights the necessity of such joint CLT in the presence of several dependent sample covariance matrices. In contrast, all the existing works on CLT for linear spectral statistics of large sample covariance matrices deal with a single sample covariance matrix ($R=1$).