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The spiked Fisher matrix is a significant topic for two-sample problems in multivariate statistical inference. This paper is dedicated to testing the number of spikes in a high-dimensional generalized spiked Fisher matrix that relaxes the Gaussian population assumption and the diagonal constraints on the population covariance matrices. First, we propose a general test statistic predicated on partial linear spectral statistics to test the number of spikes, then establish the central limit theorem (CLT) for this statistic under the null hypothesis. Second, we apply the CLT to address two statistical problems: variable selection in high-dimensional linear regression and change point detection. For each test problem, we construct new statistics and derive their asymptotic distributions under the null hypothesis. Finally, simulations and empirical analysis are conducted to demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness and generality of our proposed methods across various scenarios.

The main theme of this paper is a modification of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) for testing high dimensional covariance matrix. Recently, the correct asymptotic distribution of the LRT for a large-dimensional case (the case $p/n$ approaches to a constant $\gamma \in (0,1]$) is specified by researchers. The correct procedure is named as corrected LRT. Despite of its correction, the corrected LRT is a function of sample eigenvalues that are suffered from redundant variability from high dimensionality and, subsequently, still does not have full power in differentiating hypotheses on the covariance matrix. In this paper, motivated by the successes of a linearly shrunken covariance matrix estimator (simply shrinkage estimator) in various applications, we propose a regularized LRT that uses, in defining the LRT, the shrinkage estimator instead of the sample covariance matrix. We compute the asymptotic distribution of the regularized LRT, when the true covariance matrix is the identity matrix and a spiked covariance matrix. The obtained asymptotic results have applications in testing various hypotheses on the covariance matrix. Here, we apply them to testing the identity of the true covariance matrix, which is a long standing problem in the literature, and show that the regularized LRT outperforms the corrected LRT, which is its non-regularized counterpart. In addition, we compare the power of the regularized LRT to those of recent non-likelihood based procedures., Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures

Sample covariance matrices are widely used in multivariate statistical analysis. The central limit theorems (CLT's) for linear spectral statistics of high-dimensional non-centered sample covariance matrices have received considerable attention in random matrix theory and have been applied to many high-dimensional statistical problems. However, known population mean vectors are assumed for non-centered sample covariance matrices, some of which even assume Gaussian-like moment conditions. In fact, there are still another two most frequently used sample covariance matrices: the MLE (by subtracting the sample mean vector from each sample vector) and the unbiased sample covariance matrix (by changing the denominator $n$ as $N=n-1$ in the MLE) without depending on unknown population mean vectors. In this paper, we not only establish new CLT's for non-centered sample covariance matrices without Gaussian-like moment conditions but also characterize the non-negligible differences among the CLT's for the three classes of high-dimensional sample covariance matrices by establishing a {\em substitution principle}: substitute the {\em adjusted} sample size $N=n-1$ for the actual sample size $n$ in the major centering term of the new CLT's so as to obtain the CLT of the unbiased sample covariance matrices. Moreover, it is found that the difference between the CLT's for the MLE and unbiased sample covariance matrix is non-negligible in the major centering term although the two sample covariance matrices only have differences $n$ and $n-1$ on the dominator. The new results are applied to two testing problems for high-dimensional data., Comment: 36 pages, 23 references

For a multivariate linear model, Wilk's likelihood ratio test (LRT) constitutes one of the cornerstone tools. However, the computation of its quantiles under the null or the alternative requires complex analytic approximations and more importantly, these distributional approximations are feasible only for moderate dimension of the dependent variable, say $p\le 20$. On the other hand, assuming that the data dimension $p$ as well as the number $q$ of regression variables are fixed while the sample size $n$ grows, several asymptotic approximations are proposed in the literature for Wilk's $\bLa$ including the widely used chi-square approximation. In this paper, we consider necessary modifications to Wilk's test in a high-dimensional context, specifically assuming a high data dimension $p$ and a large sample size $n$. Based on recent random matrix theory, the correction we propose to Wilk's test is asymptotically Gaussian under the null and simulations demonstrate that the corrected LRT has very satisfactory size and power, surely in the large $p$ and large $n$ context, but also for moderately large data dimensions like $p=30$ or $p=50$. As a byproduct, we give a reason explaining why the standard chi-square approximation fails for high-dimensional data. We also introduce a new procedure for the classical multiple sample significance test in MANOVA which is valid for high-dimensional data., Comment: Accepted 02/2012 for publication in "Statistics". 20 pages, 2 pages and 2 tables

In this work, we redefined two important statistics, the CLRT test (Bai et.al., Ann. Stat. 37 (2009) 3822-3840) and the LW test (Ledoit and Wolf, Ann. Stat. 30 (2002) 1081-1102) on identity tests for high dimensional data using random matrix theories. Compared with existing CLRT and LW tests, the new tests can accommodate data which has unknown means and non-Gaussian distributions. Simulations demonstrate that the new tests have good properties in terms of size and power. What is more, even for Gaussian data, our new tests perform favorably in comparison to existing tests. Finally, we find the CLRT is more sensitive to eigenvalues less than 1 while the LW test has more advantages in relation to detecting eigenvalues larger than 1., Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, To be published in the Journal of Multivariate Analysis

In this note we develop an extension of the Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur theorem to time series model with temporal correlations. The limiting spectral distribution (LSD) of the sample covariance matrix is characterised by an explicit equation for its Stieltjes transform depending on the spectral density of the time series. A numerical algorithm is then given to compute the density functions of these LSD's.