Tracy-Widom distribution for the edge eigenvalues of elliptical model (2304.07893v2)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the largest eigenvalues of sample covariance matrices with elliptically distributed data. We consider the sample covariance matrix $Q=YY^*,$ where the data matrix $Y \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times n}$ contains i.i.d. $p$-dimensional observations $\mathbf{y}_i=\xi_iT\mathbf{u}_i,\;i=1,\dots,n.$ Here $\mathbf{u}_i$ is distributed on the unit sphere, $\xi_i \sim \xi$ is independent of $\mathbf{u}_i$ and $T^*T=\Sigma$ is some deterministic matrix. Under some mild regularity assumptions of $\Sigma,$ assuming $\xi^2$ has bounded support and certain proper behavior near its edge so that the limiting spectral distribution (LSD) of $Q$ has a square decay behavior near the spectral edge, we prove that the Tracy-Widom law holds for the largest eigenvalues of $Q$ when $p$ and $n$ are comparably large.