Concentration and moment inequalities for heavy-tailed random matrices

Abstract: We prove Fuk-Nagaev and Rosenthal-type inequalities for the sums of independent random matrices, focusing on the situation when the norms of the matrices possess finite moments of only low orders. Our bounds depend on the "intrinsic" dimensional characteristics such as the effective rank, as opposed to the dimension of the ambient space. We illustrate the advantages of such results in several applications, including new moment inequalities for sample covariance matrices and the corresponding eigenvectors of heavy-tailed random vectors. Moreover, we demonstrate that our techniques yield sharpened versions of the moment inequalities for empirical processes.