High Dimensional Statistical Inference and Random Matrices

Methods of high-dimensional probability play a central role in applications for statistics, signal processing theoretical computer science and related fields. These lectures present a sample of particularly useful tools of high-dimensional probability, focusing on the classical and matrix Bernstein's inequality and the uniform matrix deviation inequality. We illustrate these tools with applications for dimension reduction, network analysis, covariance estimation, matrix compl...

In this paper, a new ridge-type shrinkage estimator for the precision matrix has been proposed. The asymptotic optimal shrinkage coefficients and the theoretical loss were derived. Data-driven estimators for the shrinkage coefficients were also conducted based on the asymptotic results deriving from random matrix theories. The new estimator which has a simple explicit formula is distribution-free and applicable to situation where the dimension of observation is greater than t...

We study principal components regression (PCR) in an asymptotic high-dimensional regression setting, where the number of data points is proportional to the dimension. We derive exact limiting formulas for the estimation and prediction risks, which depend in a complicated manner on the eigenvalues of the population covariance, the alignment between the population PCs and the true signal, and the number of selected PCs. A key challenge in the high-dimensional setting stems from...

The purpose of this paper is to propose methodologies for statistical inference of low-dimensional parameters with high-dimensional data. We focus on constructing confidence intervals for individual coefficients and linear combinations of several of them in a linear regression model, although our ideas are applicable in a much broad context. The theoretical results presented here provide sufficient conditions for the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators along with ...

This paper investigates the central limit theorem for linear spectral statistics of high dimensional sample covariance matrices of the form $\mathbf{B}_n=n^{-1}\sum_{j=1}^{n}\mathbf{Q}\mathbf{x}_j\mathbf{x}_j^{*}\mathbf{Q}^{*}$ where $\mathbf{Q}$ is a nonrandom matrix of dimension $p\times k$, and $\{\mathbf{x}_j\}$ is a sequence of independent $k$-dimensional random vector with independent entries, under the assumption that $p/n\to y>0$. A key novelty here is that the dimens...

In this paper, we consider an estimation problem concerning the matrix of correlation coefficients in context of high dimensional data settings. In particular, we revisit some results in Li and Rolsalsky [Li, D. and Rolsalsky, A. (2006). Some strong limit theorems for the largest entries of sample correlation matrices, The Annals of Applied Probability, 16, 1, 423-447]. Four of the main theorems of Li and Rolsalsky (2006) are established in their full generalities and we simp...

In this preface to the Journal of Physics A, Special Edition on Random Matrix Theory, we give a review of the main historical developments of random matrix theory. A short summary of the papers that appear in this special edition is also given.

This paper studies the inference of the regression coefficient matrix under multivariate response linear regressions in the presence of hidden variables. A novel procedure for constructing confidence intervals of entries of the coefficient matrix is proposed. Our method first utilizes the multivariate nature of the responses by estimating and adjusting the hidden effect to construct an initial estimator of the coefficient matrix. By further deploying a low-dimensional project...

Factor models are a class of powerful statistical models that have been widely used to deal with dependent measurements that arise frequently from various applications from genomics and neuroscience to economics and finance. As data are collected at an ever-growing scale, statistical machine learning faces some new challenges: high dimensionality, strong dependence among observed variables, heavy-tailed variables and heterogeneity. High-dimensional robust factor analysis serv...

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. Wha...