Confidence Sets for Spectral Projectors of Covariance Matrices

Abstract

A sample X₁,...,X_n consisting of independent identically distributed vectors in ℝ^p with zero mean and a covariance matrix Σ is considered. The recovery of spectral projectors of high-dimensional covariance matrices from a sample of observations is a key problem in statistics arising in numerous applications. In their 2015 work, V. Koltchinskii and K. Lounici obtained nonasymptotic bounds for the Frobenius norm \(\parallel {P_r} - {\hat P_r}{\parallel _2}\) of the distance between sample and true projectors and studied asymptotic behavior for large samples. More specifically, asymptotic confidence sets for the true projector P_r were constructed assuming that the moment characteristics of the observations are known. This paper describes a bootstrap procedure for constructing confidence sets for the spectral projector P_r of the covariance matrix Σ from given data. This approach does not use the asymptotical distribution of \(\parallel {P_r} - {\hat P_r}{\parallel _2}\) and does not require the computation of its moment characteristics. The performance of the bootstrap approximation procedure is analyzed.