Spectra of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices under scale-mixture dependence
Abstract
We study the asymptotic spectral properties of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices for scale-mixture data. We consider observations of the form where the coordinates of are i.i.d.\ and the scalar mixture variable is shared by all coordinates. Under natural symmetry assumptions, the coordinates of are pairwise uncorrelated in both the Pearson and Spearman sense. Nevertheless, they are not independent when the mixture variable is non-degenerate. We show that this higher-order dependence survives the rank transformation and leaves a nontrivial spectral signature. In the proportional regime the empirical spectral distribution of the Spearman correlation matrix converges almost surely to a generalized Mar\v{c}enko--Pastur law governed by the limiting distribution of an effective rank variance. We also formulate a broader latent-variable extension, which covers, in particular, some scale-mixture models with correlated directional components. We discuss solvable examples and numerical approximations, motivated in part by heavy-tailed data in robust multivariate statistics, econometrics, and finance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.25486,
title = {Spectra of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices under scale-mixture dependence},
author = {Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Pierre Bousseyroux and Tomas Espana and Matteo Smerlak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25486},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
24 pages, 4 figures