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Spectra of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices under scale-mixture dependence

Statistics Theory 2026-07-28 v1 Probability

Abstract

We study the asymptotic spectral properties of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices for scale-mixture data. We consider observations of the form xt=σtξtRN,x_t=\sigma_t \xi_t \in \mathbb{R}^N, where the coordinates of ξt\xi_t are i.i.d.\ and the scalar mixture variable σt\sigma_t is shared by all coordinates. Under natural symmetry assumptions, the coordinates of xtx_t 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 N/Tq(0,),N/T\to q\in(0,\infty), 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