Covariance matrices are fundamental to the analysis and forecast of economic, physical and biological systems. Although the eigenvalues $\{λ_i\}$ and eigenvectors $\{{\bf u}_i\}$ of a covariance matrix are central to such endeavors, in practice one must inevitably approximate the covariance matrix based on data with finite sample size $n$ to obtain empirical eigenvalues $\{\tildeλ_i\}$ and eigenvectors $\{\tilde{\bf u}_i\}$, and therefore understanding the error so introduced is of central importance. We analyze eigenvector error $\|{\bf u}_i - \tilde{\bf u}_i \|^2$ while leveraging the assumption that the true covariance matrix having size $p$ is drawn from a matrix ensemble with known spectral properties---particularly, we assume the distribution of population eigenvalues weakly converges as $p\to\infty$ to a spectral density $ρ(λ)$ and that the spacing between population eigenvalues is similar to that for the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. Our approach complements previous analyses of eigenvector error that require the full set of eigenvalues to be known, which can be computationally infeasible when $p$ is large. To provide a scalable approach for uncertainty quantification of eigenvector error, we consider a fixed eigenvalue $λ$ and approximate the distribution of the expected square error $r= \mathbb{E}\left[\| {\bf u}_i - \tilde{\bf u}_i \|^2\right]$ across the matrix ensemble for all ${\bf u}_i$ associated with $λ_i=λ$. We find, for example, that for sufficiently large matrix size $p$ and sample size $n>p$, the probability density of $r$ scales as $1/nr^2$. This power-law scaling implies that eigenvector error is extremely heterogeneous---even if $r$ is very small for most eigenvectors, it can be large for others with non-negligible probability. We support this and further results with numerical experiments.
How many samples are sufficient to guarantee that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix are close to those of the actual covariance matrix? For a wide family of distributions, including distributions with finite second moment and distributions supported in a centered Euclidean ball, we prove that the inner product between eigenvectors of the sample and actual covariance matrices decreases proportionally to the respective eigenvalue distance. Our findings imply non-asymptotic concentration bounds for eigenvectors, eigenspaces, and eigenvalues. They also provide condit…
We consider sample covariance matrices $S_N=\frac{1}{p}Σ_N^{1/2}X_NX_N^* Σ_N^{1/2}$ where $X_N$ is a $N \times p$ real or complex matrix with i.i.d. entries with finite $12^{\rm th}$ moment and $Σ_N$ is a $N \times N$ positive definite matrix. In addition we assume that the spectral measure of $Σ_N$ almost surely converges to some limiting probability distribution as $N \to \infty$ and $p/N \to γ>0.$ We quantify the relationship between sample and population eigenvectors by studying the asymptotics of functionals of the type $\frac{1}{N} \text{Tr} (g(Σ_N) (S_N-zI)^{-1})),$ where $I$ is the ide…
The eigenvector Empirical Spectral Distribution (VESD) is adopted to investigate the limiting behavior of eigenvectors and eigenvalues of covariance matrices. In this paper, we shall show that the Kolmogorov distance between the expected VESD of sample covariance matrix and the Marčenko-Pastur distribution function is of order $O(N^{-1/2})$. Given that data dimension $n$ to sample size $N$ ratio is bounded between 0 and 1, this convergence rate is established under finite 10th moment condition of the underlying distribution. It is also shown that, for any fixed $η>0$, the convergence rates of …
In this paper we study the joint distributional convergence of the largest eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix of a $p$-dimensional time series with iid entries when $p$ converges to infinity together with the sample size $n$. We consider only heavy-tailed time series in the sense that the entries satisfy some regular variation condition which ensures that their fourth moment is infinite. In this case, Soshnikov [31, 32] and Auffinger et al. [2] proved the weak convergence of the point processes of the normalized eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix towards an inhomogeneous Pois…
In this paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of the extreme eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the spiked covariance matrices, in the supercritical regime. Specifically, we derive the joint distribution of the extreme eigenvalues and the generalized components of their associated eigenvectors in this regime.
We study principal components analyses in multivariate random and mixed effects linear models, assuming a spherical-plus-spikes structure for the covariance matrix of each random effect. We characterize the behavior of outlier sample eigenvalues and eigenvectors of MANOVA variance components estimators in such models under a high-dimensional asymptotic regime. Our results show that an aliasing phenomenon may occur in high dimensions, in which eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the MANOVA estimate for one variance component may be influenced by the other components. We propose an alternative proce…
We introduce a class of $M \times M$ sample covariance matrices $\mathcal Q$ which subsumes and generalizes several previous models. The associated population covariance matrix $Σ= \mathbb E \cal Q$ is assumed to differ from the identity by a matrix of bounded rank. All quantities except the rank of $Σ- I_M$ may depend on $M$ in an arbitrary fashion. We investigate the principal components, i.e.\ the top eigenvalues and eigenvectors, of $\mathcal Q$. We derive precise large deviation estimates on the generalized components $\langle \mathbf w, \boldsymbol ξ_i \rangle$ of the outlier and non-out…
We introduce a class of separable sample covariance matrices of the form $\widetilde{\mathcal{Q}}_1:=\widetilde A^{1/2} X \widetilde B X^* \widetilde A^{1/2}.$ Here $\widetilde{A}$ and $\widetilde{B}$ are positive definite matrices whose spectrums consist of bulk spectrums plus several spikes, i.e. larger eigenvalues that are separated from the bulks. Conceptually, we call $\widetilde{\mathcal{Q}}_1$ a \emph{spiked separable covariance matrix model}. On the one hand, this model includes the spiked covariance matrix as a special case with $\widetilde{B}=I$. On the other hand, it allows for more…
Principal component analysis is an important pattern recognition and dimensionality reduction tool in many applications. Principal components are computed as eigenvectors of a maximum likelihood covariance $\widehatΣ$ that approximates a population covariance $Σ$, and these eigenvectors are often used to extract structural information about the variables (or attributes) of the studied population. Since PCA is based on the eigendecomposition of the proxy covariance $\widehatΣ$ rather than the ground-truth $Σ$, it is important to understand the approximation error in each individual eigenvector …
We consider matrices formed by a random $N\times N$ matrix drawn from the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (or Gaussian Unitary Ensemble) plus a rank-one perturbation of strength $θ$, and focus on the largest eigenvalue, $x$, and the component, $u$, of the corresponding eigenvector in the direction associated to the rank-one perturbation. We obtain the large deviation principle governing the atypical joint fluctuations of $x$ and $u$. Interestingly, for $θ>1$, in large deviations characterized by a small value of $u$, i.e. $u<1-1/θ$, the second-largest eigenvalue pops out from the Wigner semi-circ…
We consider an inference on the eigenvalues of the covariance matrix of a multivariate normal distribution. The family of multivariate normal distributions with a fixed mean is seen as a Riemannian manifold with Fisher information metric. Two submanifolds naturally arises; one is the submanifold given by fixed eigenvectors of the covariance matrix, the other is the one given by fixed eigenvalues. We analyze the geometrical structures of these manifolds such as metric, embedding curvature under $e$-connection or $m$-connection. Based on these results, we study 1) the bias of the sample eigenval…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；IPSOS（益普索）
The eigendecomposition of a matrix is the central procedure in probabilistic models based on matrix factorization, for instance principal component analysis and topic models. Quantifying the uncertainty of such a decomposition based on a finite sample estimate is essential to reasoning under uncertainty when employing such models. This paper tackles the challenge of computing confidence bounds on the individual entries of eigenvectors of a covariance matrix of fixed dimension. Moreover, we derive a method to bound the entries of the inverse covariance matrix, the so-called precision matrix. Th…
We study the asymptotic distributions of the spiked eigenvalues and the largest nonspiked eigenvalue of the sample covariance matrix under a general covariance matrix model with divergent spiked eigenvalues, while the other eigenvalues are bounded but otherwise arbitrary. The limiting normal distribution for the spiked sample eigenvalues is established. It has distinct features that the asymptotic mean relies on not only the population spikes but also the nonspikes and that the asymptotic variance in general depends on the population eigenvectors. In addition, the limiting Tracy-Widom law for …
In this paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of the extreme eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the high dimensional spiked sample covariance matrices, in the supercritical case when a reliable detection of spikes is possible. Especially, we derive the joint distribution of the extreme eigenvalues and the generalized components of the associated eigenvectors, i.e., the projections of the eigenvectors onto arbitrary given direction, assuming that the dimension and sample size are comparably large. In general, the joint distribution is given in terms of linear combinations of finitely many Gaussi…
The aim of this paper is to establish several deep theoretical properties of principal component analysis for multiple-component spike covariance models. Our new results reveal a surprising asymptotic conical structure in critical sample eigendirections under the spike models with distinguishable (or indistinguishable) eigenvalues, when the sample size and/or the number of variables (or dimension) tend to infinity. The consistency of the sample eigenvectors relative to their population counterparts is determined by the ratio between the dimension and the product of the sample size with the spi…
We consider a $p$-dimensional time series where the dimension $p$ increases with the sample size $n$. The resulting data matrix $X$ follows a stochastic volatility model: each entry consists of a positive random volatility term multiplied by an independent noise term. The volatility multipliers introduce dependence in each row and across the rows. We study the asymptotic behavior of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrix $XX'$ under a regular variation assumption on the noise. In particular, we prove Poisson convergence for the point process of the centered and normal…
The extended Davis-Kahan theorem makes use of polynomial matrix transformations to produce bounds at least as tight as the standard Davis-Kahan theorem. The optimization problem of finding transformation parameters resulting in optimal bounds from the extended Davis-Kahan theorem is presented for affine transformations. It is demonstrated how globally optimal bound values can be computed automatically using fractional programming theory. Two different solution approaches, the Charnes-Cooper transformation and Dinkelbach's algorithm are reviewed. Our implementation of the extended Davis--Kahan …
We introduce an estimation method of covariance matrices in a high-dimensional setting, i.e., when the dimension of the matrix, , is larger than the sample size . Specifically, we propose an orthogonally equivariant estimator. The eigenvectors of such estimator are the same as those of the sample covariance matrix. The eigenvalue estimates are obtained from an adjusted profile likelihood function derived by approximating the integral of the density function of the sample covariance matrix over its eigenvectors, which is a challenging problem in its own right. Exact solutions to the approximate…
This paper develops efficient ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) implementations based on shrinkage covariance estimation. The forecast ensemble members at each step are used to estimate the background error covariance matrix via the Rao-Blackwell Ledoit and Wolf estimator, which has been developed specifically developed to approximate high-dimensional covariance matrices using a small number of samples. Additional samples are taken from the normal distribution described by the background ensemble mean and the estimated background covariance matrix in order to increase the size of the ensemble and …
Analyzing principal components for multivariate data from its spatial sign covariance matrix (SCM) has been proposed as a computationally simple and robust alternative to normal PCA, but it suffers from poor efficiency properties and is actually inadmissible with respect to the maximum likelihood estimator. Here we use data depth-based spatial ranks in place of spatial signs to obtain the orthogonally equivariant Depth Covariance Matrix (DCM) and use its eigenvector estimates for PCA. We derive asymptotic properties of the sample DCM and influence functions of its eigenvectors. The shapes of t…
Portfolio managers faced with limited sample sizes must use factor models to estimate the covariance matrix of a high-dimensional returns vector. For the simplest one-factor market model, success rests on the quality of the estimated leading eigenvector "beta". When only the returns themselves are observed, the practitioner has available the "PCA" estimate equal to the leading eigenvector of the sample covariance matrix. This estimator performs poorly in various ways. To address this problem in the high-dimension, limited sample size asymptotic regime and in the context of estimating the minim…
Rejuvenation in particle filters is necessary to prevent the collapse of the weights when the number of particles is insufficient to sample the high probability regions of the state space. Rejuvenation is often implemented in a heuristic manner by the addition of stochastic samples that widen the support of the ensemble. This work aims at improving canonical rejuvenation methodology by the introduction of additional prior information obtained from climatological samples; the dynamical particles used for importance sampling are augmented with samples obtained from stochastic covariance shrinkag…
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a classical dimension reduction method which projects data onto the principal subspace spanned by the leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix. However, it behaves poorly when the number of features p is comparable to, or even much larger than, the sample size n. In this paper, we propose a new iterative thresholding approach for estimating principal subspaces in the setting where the leading eigenvectors are sparse. Under a spiked covariance model, we find that the new approach recovers the principal subspace and leading eigenvectors consistently, an…
This paper develops an efficient implementation of the ensemble Kalman filter based on a modified Cholesky decomposition for inverse covariance matrix estimation. This implementation is named EnKF-MC. Background errors corresponding to distant model components with respect to some radius of influence are assumed to be conditionally independent. This allows to obtain sparse estimators of the inverse background error covariance matrix. The computational effort of the proposed method is discussed and different formulations based on various matrix identities are provided. Furthermore, an asymptoti…
We derive the asymptotic distributions of the spiked eigenvalues and eigenvectors under a generalized and unified asymptotic regime, which takes into account the spike magnitude of leading eigenvalues, sample size, and dimensionality. This new regime allows high dimensionality and diverging eigenvalue spikes and provides new insights into the roles the leading eigenvalues, sample size, and dimensionality play in principal component analysis. The results are proven by a technical device, which swaps the role of rows and columns and converts the high-dimensional problems into low-dimensional one…
This note examines the influence of covariance inflation on the distance between the measured observation and the simulated (or predicted) observation with respect to the state estimate. In order for the aforementioned distance to be bounded in a certain interval, some sufficient conditions are derived, indicating that the covariance inflation factor should be bounded in a certain interval, and that the inflation bounds are related to the maximum and minimum eigenvalues of certain matrices. Implications of these analytic results are discussed, and a numerical experiment is presented to verify …
In this paper, we study the random matrix model of Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE) with fixed-rank (aka spiked) external source. We will focus on the critical regime of the Baik-Ben Arous-Péché (BBP) phase transition and establish the distribution of the eigenvectors associated with the leading eigenvalues. The distribution is given in terms of a determinantal point process with extended Airy kernel. Our result can be regarded as an eigenvector counterpart of the BBP eigenvalue phase transition (arXiv:math/0403022). The derivation of the distribution makes use of the recently re-discovered eig…
Ensemble filters implement sequential Bayesian estimation by representing the probability distribution by an ensemble mean and covariance. Unbiased square root ensemble filters use deterministic algorithms to produce an analysis (posterior) ensemble with prescribed mean and covariance, consistent with the Kalman update. This includes several filters used in practice, such as the Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (ETKF), the Ensemble Adjustment Kalman Filter (EAKF), and a filter by Whitaker and Hamill. We show that at every time index, as the number of ensemble members increases to infinity, the…
Enabling High-Accuracy Data Assimilation with Limited Ensembles via Machine Learning-Based Covariance Correction
University of Macau（澳门大学）；Macau Millennium College（澳门千禧学院）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Ningbo Institute of Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学宁波研究院）；Hongik University（弘益大学）；Zhuhai UM Science and Technology Research Institute（珠海中大（或澳门大学）科学与技术研究院）
Principal loading analysis is a dimension reduction method that discards variables which have only a small distorting effect on the covariance matrix. We complement principal loading analysis and propose to rather use a mix of both, the correlation and covariance matrix instead. Further, we suggest to use rescaled eigenvectors and provide updated algorithms for all proposed changes.
We consider general high-dimensional spiked sample covariance models and show that their leading sample spiked eigenvalues and their linear spectral statistics are asymptotically independent when the sample size and dimension are proportional to each other. As a byproduct, we also establish the central limit theorem of the leading sample spiked eigenvalues by removing the block diagonal assumption on the population covariance matrix, which is commonly needed in the literature. Moreover, we propose consistent estimators of the $L_4$ norm of the spiked population eigenvectors. Based on these res…
Riemannian Gaussian distributions were initially introduced as basic building blocks for learning models which aim to capture the intrinsic structure of statistical populations of positive-definite matrices (here called covariance matrices). While the potential applications of such models have attracted significant attention, a major obstacle still stands in the way of these applications: there seems to exist no practical method of computing the normalising factors associated with Riemannian Gaussian distributions on spaces of high-dimensional covariance matrices. The present paper shows that …
This paper is the first chapter of three of the author's undergraduate thesis. We study the random matrix ensemble of covariance matrices arising from random $(d_b, d_w)$-regular bipartite graphs on a set of $M$ black vertices and $N$ white vertices, for $d_b \gg \log^4 N$. We simultaneously prove that the Green's functions of these covariance matrices and the adjacency matrices of the underlying graphs agree with the corresponding limiting law (e.g. Marchenko-Pastur law for covariance matrices) down to the optimal scale. This is an improvement from the previously known mesoscopic results. We …
We show that in a common high-dimensional covariance model, the choice of loss function has a profound effect on optimal estimation. In an asymptotic framework based on the Spiked Covariance model and use of orthogonally invariant estimators, we show that optimal estimation of the population covariance matrix boils down to design of an optimal shrinker $η$ that acts elementwise on the sample eigenvalues. Indeed, to each loss function there corresponds a unique admissible eigenvalue shrinker $η^*$ dominating all other shrinkers. The shape of the optimal shrinker is determined by the choice of l…
This work provides a unified analysis of the properties of the sample covariance matrix $Σ_n$ over the class of $p\times p$ population covariance matrices $Σ$ of reduced effective rank $r_e(Σ)$. This class includes scaled factor models and covariance matrices with decaying spectrum. We consider $r_e(Σ)$ as a measure of matrix complexity, and obtain sharp minimax rates on the operator and Frobenius norm of $Σ_n-Σ$, as a function of $r_e(Σ)$ and $\|Σ\|_2$, the operator norm of $Σ$. With guidelines offered by the optimal rates, we define classes of matrices of reduced effective rank over which $Σ…
