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This paper proposes procedures for testing the equality hypothesis and the proportionality hypothesis involving a large number of $q$ covariance matrices of dimension $p\times p$. Under a limiting scheme where $p$, $q$ and the sample sizes from the $q$ populations grow to infinity in a proper manner, the proposed test statistics are shown to be asymptotically normal. Simulation results show that finite sample properties of the test procedures are satisfactory under both the null and alternatives. As an application, we derive a test procedure for the Kronecker product covariance specification for transposable data. Empirical analysis of datasets from the Mouse Aging Project and the 1000 Genomes Project (phase 3) is also conducted., Comment: Keywords and phrases: Many-sample test, Equality hypothesis, Multivariate analysis, Hypothesis testing, Proportionality hypothesis, Large covariance matrix, U -statistics, Transposable data. 65 pages

Determining the number of factors in high-dimensional factor modeling is essential but challenging, especially when the data are heavy-tailed. In this paper, we introduce a new estimator based on the spectral properties of Spearman sample correlation matrix under the high-dimensional setting, where both dimension and sample size tend to infinity proportionally. Our estimator is robust against heavy tails in either the common factors or idiosyncratic errors. The consistency of our estimator is established under mild conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superiority of our estimator compared to existing methods.

A widely adopted approach for detecting weak instruments is to use the first-stage $F$ statistic. While this method was developed with a fixed number of instruments, its performance with many instruments remains insufficiently explored. We show that the first-stage $F$ test exhibits distorted sizes for detecting many weak instruments, regardless of the choice of pretested estimators or Wald tests. These distortions occur due to the inadequate approximation using classical noncentral Chi-squared distributions. As a byproduct of our main result, we present an alternative approach to pre-test many weak instruments with the corrected first-stage $F$ statistic. An empirical illustration with Angrist and Keueger (1991)'s returns to education data confirms its usefulness.

This paper develops a new specification test for the instrument weakness when the number of instruments $K_n$ is large with a magnitude comparable to the sample size $n$. The test relies on the fact that the difference between the two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimator and the ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator asymptotically disappears when there are many weak instruments, but otherwise converges to a non-zero limit. We establish the limiting distribution of the difference within the above two specifications, and introduce a delete-$d$ Jackknife procedure to consistently estimate the asymptotic variance/covariance of the difference. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate the good performance of the test procedure for both cases of single and multiple endogenous variables. Additionally, we re-examine the analysis of returns to education data in Angrist and Keueger (1991) using our proposed test. Both the simulation results and empirical analysis indicate the reliability of the test.

This paper revisits the Lagrange multiplier type test for the null hypothesis of no cross-sectional dependence in large panel data models. We propose a unified test procedure and its power enhancement version, which show robustness for a wide class of panel model contexts. Specifically, the two procedures are applicable to both heterogeneous and fixed effects panel data models with the presence of weakly exogenous as well as lagged dependent regressors, allowing for a general form of nonnormal error distribution. With the tools from Random Matrix Theory, the asymptotic validity of the test procedures is established under the simultaneous limit scheme where the number of time periods and the number of cross-sectional units go to infinity proportionally. The derived theories are accompanied by detailed Monte Carlo experiments, which confirm the robustness of the two tests and also suggest the validity of the power enhancement technique.

Recent works have demonstrated a double descent phenomenon in over-parameterized learning. Although this phenomenon has been investigated by recent works, it has not been fully understood in theory. In this paper, we investigate the multiple descent phenomenon in a class of multi-component prediction models. We first consider a ''double random feature model'' (DRFM) concatenating two types of random features, and study the excess risk achieved by the DRFM in ridge regression. We calculate the precise limit of the excess risk under the high dimensional framework where the training sample size, the dimension of data, and the dimension of random features tend to infinity proportionally. Based on the calculation, we further theoretically demonstrate that the risk curves of DRFMs can exhibit triple descent. We then provide a thorough experimental study to verify our theory. At last, we extend our study to the ''multiple random feature model'' (MRFM), and show that MRFMs ensembling $K$ types of random features may exhibit $(K+1)$-fold descent. Our analysis points out that risk curves with a specific number of descent generally exist in learning multi-component prediction models., Comment: 89 pages, 9 figures. Version 3 adds new description of triple descent in certain double random feature model, deletes the discussion of NTK regimes, and adds more literature references

We study the eigenvalue distributions for sums of independent rank-one $k$-fold tensor products of large $n$-dimensional vectors. Previous results in the literature assume that $k=o(n)$ and show that the eigenvalue distributions converge to the celebrated Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law under appropriate moment conditions on the base vectors. In this paper, motivated by quantum information theory, we study the regime where $k$ grows faster, namely $k=O(n)$. We show that the moment sequences of the eigenvalue distributions have a limit, which is different from the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law. As a byproduct, we show that the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law limit holds if and only if $k=o(n)$ for this tensor model. The approach is based on the method of moments., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures

Much research effort has been devoted to explaining the success of deep learning. Random Matrix Theory (RMT) provides an emerging way to this end: spectral analysis of large random matrices involved in a trained deep neural network (DNN) such as weight matrices or Hessian matrices with respect to the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. To have more comprehensive understanding of weight matrices spectra, we conduct extensive experiments on weight matrices in different modules, e.g., layers, networks and data sets. Following the previous work of \cite{martin2018implicit}, we classify the spectra in the terminal stage into three main types: Light Tail (LT), Bulk Transition period (BT) and Heavy Tail(HT). These different types, especially HT, implicitly indicate some regularization in the DNNs. A main contribution from the paper is that we identify the difficulty of the classification problem as a driving factor for the appearance of heavy tail in weight matrices spectra. Higher the classification difficulty, higher the chance for HT to appear. Moreover, the classification difficulty can be affected by the signal-to-noise ratio of the dataset, or by the complexity of the classification problem (complex features, large number of classes) as well. Leveraging on this finding, we further propose a spectral criterion to detect the appearance of heavy tails and use it to early stop the training process without testing data. Such early stopped DNNs have the merit of avoiding overfitting and unnecessary extra training while preserving a much comparable generalization ability. These findings from the paper are validated in several NNs, using Gaussian synthetic data and real data sets (MNIST and CIFAR10).

Motivated by the stochastic block model, we investigate a class of Wigner-type matrices with certain block structures, and establish a CLT for the corresponding linear spectral statistics via the large-deviation bounds from local law and the cumulant expansion formula. We apply the results to the stochastic block model. Specifically, a class of renormalized adjacency matrices will be block-Wigner-type matrices. Further, we show that for certain estimator of such renormalized adjacency matrices, which will be no longer Wigner-type but share long-range non-decaying weak correlations among the entries, the linear spectral statistics of such estimators will still share the same limiting behavior as those of the block-Wigner-type matrices, thus enabling hypothesis testing about stochastic block model., Comment: 5 figures; 53 pages

Since the introduction of Dyson's Brownian motion in early 1960's, there have been a lot of developments in the investigation of stochastic processes on the space of Hermitian matrices. Their properties, especially, the properties of their eigenvalues have been studied in great details. In particular, the limiting behaviors of the eigenvalues are found when the dimension of the matrix space tends to infinity, which connects with random matrix theory. This survey reviews a selection of results on the eigenvalues of stochastic processes from the literature of the past three decades. For most recent variations of such processes, such as matrix-valued processes driven by fractional Brownian motion or Brownian sheet, the eigenvalues of them are also discussed in this survey. In the end, some open problems in the area are also proposed., Comment: 28 pages

The asymptotic normality for a large family of eigenvalue statistics of a general sample covariance matrix is derived under the ultra-high dimensional setting, that is, when the dimension to sample size ratio $p/n \to \infty$. Based on this CLT result, we first adapt the covariance matrix test problem to the new ultra-high dimensional context. Then as a second application, we develop a new test for the separable covariance structure of a matrix-valued white noise. Simulation experiments are conducted for the investigation of finite-sample properties of the general asymptotic normality of eigenvalue statistics, as well as the second test for separable covariance structure of matrix-valued white noise.

In this paper, we analyse singular values of a large $p\times n$ data matrix $\mathbf{X}_n= (\mathbf{x}_{n1},\ldots,\mathbf{x}_{nn})$ where the column $\mathbf{x}_{nj}$'s are independent $p$-dimensional vectors, possibly with different distributions. Such data matrices are common in high-dimensional statistics. Under a key assumption that the covariance matrices $\mathbf{\Sigma}_{nj}=\text{Cov}(\mathbf{x}_{nj})$ can be asymptotically simultaneously diagonalizable, and appropriate convergence of their spectra, we establish a limiting distribution for the singular values of $\mathbf{X}_n$ when both dimension $p$ and $n$ grow to infinity in a comparable magnitude. The matrix model goes beyond and includes many existing works on different types of sample covariance matrices, including the weighted sample covariance matrix, the Gram matrix model and the sample covariance matrix of linear times series models. Furthermore, we develop two applications of our general approach. First, we obtain the existence and uniqueness of a new limiting spectral distribution of realized covariance matrices for a multi-dimensional diffusion process with anisotropic time-varying co-volatility processes. Secondly, we derive the limiting spectral distribution for singular values of the data matrix for a recent matrix-valued auto-regressive model. Finally, for a generalized finite mixture model, the limiting spectral distribution for singular values of the data matrix is obtained.

We reexamine the classical linear regression model when the model is subject to two types of uncertainty: (i) some of covariates are either missing or completely inaccessible, and (ii) the variance of the measurement error is undetermined and changing according to a mechanism unknown to the statistician. By following the recent theory of sublinear expectation, we propose to characterize such mean and variance uncertainty in the response variable by two specific nonlinear random variables, which encompass an infinite family of probability distributions for the response variable in the sense of (linear) classical probability theory. The approach enables a family of estimators under various loss functions for the regression parameter and the parameters related to model uncertainty. The consistency of the estimators is established under mild conditions on the data generation process. Three applications are introduced to assess the quality of the approach including a forecasting model for the S\&P Index., Comment: 31

We introduce a new random matrix model called distance covariance matrix in this paper, whose normalized trace is equivalent to the distance covariance. We first derive a deterministic limit for the eigenvalue distribution of the distance covariance matrix when the dimensions of the vectors and the sample size tend to infinity simultaneously. This limit is valid when the vectors are independent or weakly dependent through a finite-rank perturbation. It is also universal and independent of the details of the distributions of the vectors. Furthermore, the top eigenvalues of this distance covariance matrix are shown to obey an exact phase transition when the dependence of the vectors is of finite rank. This finding enables the construction of a new detector for such weak dependence where classical methods based on large sample covariance matrices or sample canonical correlations may fail in the considered high-dimensional framework., Comment: 42 pages, 6 fugures. Forthcoming in "Statistica Sinica" (2021+)

Inference of population structure from genetic data plays an important role in population and medical genetics studies. With the advancement and decreasing cost of sequencing technology, the increasingly available whole genome sequencing data provide much richer information about the underlying population structure. The traditional method (Patterson, Price, and Reich, 2006) originally developed for array-based genotype data for computing and selecting top principal components that capture population structure may not perform well on sequencing data for two reasons. First, the number of genetic variants p is much larger than the sample size n in sequencing data such that the sample-to-marker ratio n/p is nearly zero, violating the assumption of the Tracy-Widom test used in their method. Second, their method might not be able to handle the linkage disequilibrium well in sequencing data. To resolve those two practical issues, we propose a new method called ERStruct to determine the number of top informative principal components based on sequencing data. More specifically, we propose to use the ratio of consecutive eigenvalues as a more robust test statistic, and then we approximate its null distribution using modern random matrix theory. Both simulation studies and applications to two public data sets from the HapMap 3 and the 1000 Genomes Projects demonstrate the empirical performance of our ERStruct method.

This paper reexamines the seminal Lagrange multiplier test for cross-section independence in a large panel model where both the number of cross-sectional units n and the number of time series observations T can be large. The first contribution of the paper is an enlargement of the test with two extensions: firstly the new asymptotic normality is derived in a simultaneous limiting scheme where the two dimensions (n, T) tend to infinity with comparable magnitudes; second, the result is valid for general error distribution (not necessarily normal). The second contribution of the paper is a new test statistic based on the sum of the fourth powers of cross-section correlations from OLS residuals, instead of their squares used in the Lagrange multiplier statistic. This new test is generally more powerful, and the improvement is particularly visible against alternatives with weak or sparse cross-section dependence. Both simulation study and real data analysis are proposed to demonstrate the advantages of the enlarged Lagrange multiplier test and the power enhanced test in comparison with the existing procedures., Comment: 39 papers, 8 figures

In this article, we establish a limiting distribution for eigenvalues of a class of auto-covariance matrices. The same distribution has been found in the literature for a regularized version of these auto-covariance matrices. The original non-regularized auto-covariance matrices are non invertible which introduce supplementary diffculties for the study of their eigenvalues through Girko's Hermitization scheme. The key result in this paper is a new polynomial lower bound for the least singular value of the resolvent matrices associated to a rank-defective quadratic function of a random matrix with independent and identically distributed entries. Another improvement in the paper is that the lag of the auto-covariance matrices can grow to infinity with the matrix dimension., Comment: 41 pages

We consider a data matrix $X:=C_N^{1/2}ZR_M^{1/2}$ from a multivariate stationary process with a separable covariance function, where $C_N$ is a $N\times N$ positive semi-definite matrix, $Z$ a $N\times M$ random matrix of uncorrelated standardized white noise, and $R_M$ a $M\times M$ Toeplitz matrix. Under the assumption of long range dependence (LRD), we re-examine the consistency of two toeplitzifized estimators $\hat R_M$ (unbiased) and $\hat R_M^b$ (biased) for $R_M$, which are known to be norm consistent with $R_M$ when the process is short range dependent (SRD). However in the LRD case, some simulations suggest that the norm consistency does not hold in general for both estimators. Instead, a weaker {\it ratio consistency} is established for the unbiased estimator $\hat R_M$, and a further weaker {\it ratio LSD consistency} is established for the biased estimator $\hat R_M^b$. The main result leads to a consistent whitening procedure on the original data matrix $X$, which is further applied to two real world questions, one is a signal detection problem, and the other is PCA on the space covariance $C_N$ to achieve a noise reduction and data compression.

Consider a $p$-dimensional population ${\mathbf x} \in\mathbb{R}^p$ with iid coordinates in the domain of attraction of a stable distribution with index $\alpha\in (0,2)$. Since the variance of ${\mathbf x}$ is infinite, the sample covariance matrix ${\mathbf S}_n=n^{-1}\sum_{i=1}^n {{\mathbf x}_i}{\mathbf x}'_i$ based on a sample ${\mathbf x}_1,\ldots,{\mathbf x}_n$ from the population is not well behaved and it is of interest to use instead the sample correlation matrix ${\mathbf R}_n= \{\operatorname{diag}({\mathbf S}_n)\}^{-1/2}\, {\mathbf S}_n \{\operatorname{diag}({\mathbf S}_n)\}^{-1/2}$. This paper finds the limiting distributions of the eigenvalues of ${\mathbf R}_n$ when both the dimension $p$ and the sample size $n$ grow to infinity such that $p/n\to \gamma \in (0,\infty)$. The family of limiting distributions $\{H_{\alpha,\gamma}\}$ is new and depends on the two parameters $\alpha$ and $\gamma$. The moments of $H_{\alpha,\gamma}$ are fully identified as sum of two contributions: the first from the classical Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law and a second due to heavy tails. Moreover, the family $\{H_{\alpha,\gamma}\}$ has continuous extensions at the boundaries $\alpha=2$ and $\alpha=0$ leading to the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law and a modified Poisson distribution, respectively. Our proofs use the method of moments, the path-shortening algorithm developed in [18] and some novel graph counting combinatorics. As a consequence, the moments of $H_{\alpha,\gamma}$ are expressed in terms of combinatorial objects such as Stirling numbers of the second kind. A simulation study on these limiting distributions $H_{\alpha,\gamma}$ is also provided for comparison with the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law., Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures

In this article, we study high-dimensional behavior of empirical spectral distributions $\{L_N(t), t\in[0,T]\}$ for a class of $N\times N$ symmetric/Hermitian random matrices, whose entries are generated from the solution of stochastic differential equation driven by fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $H \in(1/2,1)$. For Wigner-type matrices, we obtain almost sure relative compactness of $\{L_N(t), t\in[0,T]\}_{N\in\mathbb N}$ in $C([0,T], \mathbf P(\mathbb R))$ following the approach in \cite{Anderson2010}; for Wishart-type matrices, we obtain tightness of $\{L_N(t), t\in[0,T]\}_{N\in\mathbb N}$ on $C([0,T], \mathbf P(\mathbb R))$ by tightness criterions provided in Appendix \ref{subset:tightness argument}. The limit of $\{L_N(t), t\in[0,T]\}$ as $N\to \infty$ is also characterised., Comment: 28 pages