Covariance Estimation in Elliptical Models with Convex Structure

Abstract: We address structured covariance estimation in Elliptical distribution. We assume it is a priori known that the covariance belongs to a given convex set, e.g., the set of Toeplitz or banded matrices. We consider the General Method of Moments (GMM) optimization subject to these convex constraints. Unfortunately, GMM is still non-convex due to objective. Instead, we propose COCA - a convex relaxation which can be efficiently solved. We prove that the relaxation is tight in the unconstrained case for a finite number of samples, and in the constrained case asymptotically. We then illustrate the advantages of COCA in synthetic simulations with structured Compound Gaussian distributions. In these examples, COCA outperforms competing methods as Tyler's estimate and its projection onto a convex set.