On eigenvalues of a high-dimensional spatial-sign covariance matrix

Abstract

This paper investigates limiting spectral properties of a high-dimensional sample spatial-sign covariance matrix when both the dimension of the observations and the sample size grow to infinity. The underlying population is general enough to include the popular independent components model and the family of elliptical distributions. The first result of the paper shows that the empirical spectral distribution of a high dimensional sample spatial-sign covariance matrix converges to a generalized Marčenko-Pastur distribution. Secondly, a new central limit theorem for a class of related linear spectral statistics is established.