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.
We consider high-dimensional measurement errors with high-frequency data. Our focus is on recovering the covariance matrix of the random errors with optimality. In this problem, not all components of the random vector are observed at the same time and the measurement errors are latent variables, leading to major challenges besides high data dimensionality. We propose a new covariance matrix estimator in this context with appropriate localization and thresholding. By developing a new technical device integrating the high-frequency data feature with the conventional notion of $alpha$-mixing, our analysis successfully accommodates the challenging serial dependence in the measurement errors. Our theoretical analysis establishes the minimax optimal convergence rates associated with two commonly used loss functions. We then establish cases when the proposed localized estimator with thresholding achieves the minimax optimal convergence rates. Considering that the variances and covariances can be small in reality, we conduct a second-order theoretical analysis that further disentangles the dominating bias in the estimator. A bias-corrected estimator is then proposed to ensure its practical finite sample performance. We illustrate the promising empirical performance of the proposed estimator with extensive simulation studies and a real data analysis.
In sparse principal component analysis we are given noisy observations of a low-rank matrix of dimension $ntimes p$ and seek to reconstruct it under additional sparsity assumptions. In particular, we assume here each of the principal components $mathbf{v}_1,dots,mathbf{v}_r$ has at most $s_0$ non-zero entries. We are particularly interested in the high dimensional regime wherein $p$ is comparable to, or even much larger than $n$. In an influential paper, cite{johnstone2004sparse} introduced a simple algorithm that estimates the support of the principal vectors $mathbf{v}_1,dots,mathbf{v}_r$ by the largest entries in the diagonal of the empirical covariance. This method can be shown to identify the correct support with high probability if $s_0le K_1sqrt{n/log p}$, and to fail with high probability if $s_0ge K_2 sqrt{n/log p}$ for two constants $0<K_1,K_2<infty$. Despite a considerable amount of work over the last ten years, no practical algorithm exists with provably better support recovery guarantees. Here we analyze a covariance thresholding algorithm that was recently proposed by cite{KrauthgamerSPCA}. On the basis of numerical simulations (for the rank-one case), these authors conjectured that covariance thresholding correctly recover the support with high probability for $s_0le Ksqrt{n}$ (assuming $n$ of the same order as $p$). We prove this conjecture, and in fact establish a more general guarantee including higher-rank as well as $n$ much smaller than $p$. Recent lower bounds cite{berthet2013computational, ma2015sum} suggest that no polynomial time algorithm can do significantly better. The key technical component of our analysis develops new bounds on the norm of kernel random matrices, in regimes that were not considered before.
We propose a new unsupervised learning method for clustering a large number of time series based on a latent factor structure. Each cluster is characterized by its own cluster-specific factors in addition to some common factors which impact on all the time series concerned. Our setting also offers the flexibility that some time series may not belong to any clusters. The consistency with explicit convergence rates is established for the estimation of the common factors, the cluster-specific factors, the latent clusters. Numerical illustration with both simulated data as well as a real data example is also reported. As a spin-off, the proposed new approach also advances significantly the statistical inference for the factor model of Lam and Yao (2012).
This paper deals with the dimension reduction for high-dimensional time series based on common factors. In particular we allow the dimension of time series $p$ to be as large as, or even larger than, the sample size $n$. The estimation for the factor loading matrix and the factor process itself is carried out via an eigenanalysis for a $ptimes p$ non-negative definite matrix. We show that when all the factors are strong in the sense that the norm of each column in the factor loading matrix is of the order $p^{1/2}$, the estimator for the factor loading matrix, as well as the resulting estimator for the precision matrix of the original $p$-variant time series, are weakly consistent in $L_2$-norm with the convergence rates independent of $p$. This result exhibits clearly that the `curse is canceled out by the `blessings in dimensionality. We also establish the asymptotic properties of the estimation when not all factors are strong. For the latter case, a two-step estimation procedure is preferred accordingly to the asymptotic theory. The proposed methods together with their asymptotic properties are further illustrated in a simulation study. An application to a real data set is also reported.