Tracy-Widom law for the extreme eigenvalues of sample correlation matrices

TL;DR

This paper establishes the Tracy-Widom law for the extreme eigenvalues of sample correlation matrices under certain distributional assumptions, extending random matrix theory results to more general data distributions.

Contribution

It proves the Tracy-Widom law for both the largest and smallest eigenvalues of sample correlation matrices with sub-exponential tail distributions, generalizing previous Gaussian-based results.

Findings

Tracy-Widom law applies to extreme eigenvalues of correlation matrices

Results hold for sub-exponential tail distributions

Extends classical results beyond Gaussian assumptions

Abstract

Let the sample correlation matrix be $W=YY^T$, where $Y=(y_{ij})_{p,n}$ with $y_{ij}=x_{ij}/\sqrt{\sum_{j=1}^nx_{ij}^2}$. We assume $\{x_{ij}: 1\leq i\leq p, 1\leq j\leq n\}$ to be a collection of independent symmetric distributed random variables with sub-exponential tails. Moreover, for any $i$, we assume $x_{ij}, 1\leq j\leq n$ to be identically distributed. We assume $0<p<n$ and $p/n\rightarrow y$ with some $y\in(0,1)$ as $p,n\rightarrow\infty$. In this paper, we provide the Tracy-Widom law ($TW_1$) for both the largest and smallest eigenvalues of $W$. If $x_{ij}$ are i.i.d. standard normal, we can derive the $TW_1$ for both the largest and smallest eigenvalues of the matrix $\mathcal{R}=RR^T$, where $R=(r_{ij})_{p,n}$ with $r_{ij}=(x_{ij}-\bar x_i)/\sqrt{\sum_{j=1}^n(x_{ij}-\bar x_i)^2}$, $\bar x_i=n^{-1}\sum_{j=1}^nx_{ij}$.