Spectra of Wishart Matrices with size-dependent entries

Abstract: We prove the convergence of the empirical spectral measure of Wishart matrices with size-dependent entries and characterize the limiting law by its moments. We apply our result to the cases where the entries are Bernoulli variables with parameter c=n or truncated heavy-tailed random variables. In both cases, when c goes to infinity or when the truncation is small, the limiting spectrum is a perturbation of the Marchenko-Pastur distribution and we compute its leading term.