Eigenvalue statistics for the sum of two complex Wishart matrices

Abstract: The sum of independent Wishart matrices, taken from distributions with unequal covariance matrices, plays a crucial role in multivariate statistics, and has applications in the fields of quantitative finance and telecommunication. However, analytical results concerning the corresponding eigenvalue statistics have remained unavailable, even for the sum of two Wishart matrices. This can be attributed to the complicated and rotationally noninvariant nature of the matrix distribution that makes extracting the information about eigenvalues a nontrivial task. Using a generalization of the Harish-Chandra-Itzykson-Zuber integral, we find exact solution to this problem for the complex Wishart case when one of the covariance matrices is proportional to the identity matrix, while the other is arbitrary. We derive exact and compact expressions for the joint probability density and marginal density of eigenvalues. The analytical results are compared with numerical simulations and we find perfect agreement.