Regularized estimation of large covariance matrices

Details Regularized estimation of large covariance matrices Regularized estimation of large covariance matrices

2008-03-13

arxiv.org/abs/0803.1909v1

Annals of Statistics 2008, Vol. 36, No. 1, 199-227

Mathematics

Statistics Theory

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000758 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Inst

Scientific paper

10.1214/009053607000000758

This paper considers estimating a covariance matrix of $p$ variables from $n$ observations by either banding or tapering the sample covariance matrix, or estimating a banded version of the inverse of the covariance. We show that these estimates are consistent in the operator norm as long as $(\log p)/n\to0$, and obtain explicit rates. The results are uniform over some fairly natural well-conditioned families of covariance matrices. We also introduce an analogue of the Gaussian white noise model and show that if the population covariance is embeddable in that model and well-conditioned, then the banded approximations produce consistent estimates of the eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors of the covariance matrix. The results can be extended to smooth versions of banding and to non-Gaussian distributions with sufficiently short tails. A resampling approach is proposed for choosing the banding parameter in practice. This approach is illustrated numerically on both simulated and real data.

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