Confidence Intervals for Wishart Random Matrices

In this post we briefly describe Wishart-distributed random matrices and a result from (Chiani, 2017), which provides an algorithm for calculating the probability that a standard Wishart-distributed matrix’s eigenvalues lie within a given interval. The functions described in this post are implemented in Python here, including Algorithm 1 from (Chiani, 2017). We also talk about quantile functions and non-standard Wishart-distributed matrices.

The Wishart distribution

Suppose we have the $p\times p$ random matrix

where $n\geq p$ and each $\bm{x}_i\in\mathbb{R}^p$ is independently drawn from a zero-mean multivariate normal distribution

with positive definite covariance matrix $\bm{\Sigma}$. Then $\bm{A}$ is Wishart-distributed, and we write

where $n$ is called the degrees of freedom. We refer to the special case $\mathcal{W}_p(\bm{I}_p,n)$ as the standard Wishart distribution, where $\bm{I}_p$ is the $p\times p$ identity matrix.

The Wishart distribution arises as the conjugate prior to the inverse covariance matrix of a multivariate normal distribution in Bayesian statistics, among other places.

One property of the Wishart distribution that we will make use of later is that if $\bm{A}\sim\mathcal{W}_p(\bm{\Sigma},n)$ and $\bm{C}\in\mathbb{R}^{p \times p}$ is a constant, full-rank matrix, then

Confidence bounds on the eigenvalues of standard Wishart matrices

Suppose we want to compute the probability that the eigenvalues of some standard Wishart-distributed matrix

are contained in a given interval $[a,b]$, with $0\leq a\leq b$. We denote this probability as

where $\lambda_{\min}(\bm{S})$ and $\lambda_{\max}(\bm{S})$ are the minimum and maximum eigenvalues of $\bm{S}$, respectively. The probability $\eqref{2}$ is equivalent to

(see Appendix A.5.2 of (Boyd & Vandenberghe, 2004)), where the notation $\bm{A}\preccurlyeq\bm{B}$ means that $\bm{B}-\bm{A}$ is positive semidefinite.

Algorithm 1 of (Chiani, 2017) tells us how to compute the function $\psi(a,b)$ such that

and I’ve implemented this algorithm in Python here. This immediately gives us the cumulative density functions (CDFs) of the minimum and maximum eigenvalues of $\bm{S}$:

where $C_{\min}$ and $C_{\max}$ are the CDFs for the minimum and maximum eigenvalues, respectively.

Quantile functions

We now have a method for computing the CDFs of the eigenvalues, but we do not have the inverse CDFs (i.e., the quantile functions), which compute the bounds required to achieve a given probability. For example, suppose we want to find the value $b\geq0$ such that $\lambda_{\max}(\bm{S})\leq b$ with a given probability $\rho\in[0,1]$. One way to do this is by solving the optimization problem

which is also implemented here, using one of scipy’s built-in solvers.

Non-standard Wishart matrices

We can extend the results above to the non-standard Wishart-distributed matrix

In particular, generalizing $\eqref{3}$ we get

To see this, let $\bm{L}$ be the Cholesky decomposition of $\bm{\Sigma}$, such that $\bm{L}\bm{L}^T=\bm{\Sigma}$. Since $\bm{\Sigma}$ is positive definite, $\bm{L}$ is full-rank and invertible. Then from $\eqref{1}$ we know that $\bm{L}^{-1}\bm{A}\bm{L}^{-T}\sim\mathcal{W}_p(\bm{L}^{-1}\bm{\Sigma}\bm{L}^{-T},n)=\mathcal{W}_p(\bm{I}_p,n)$, which means that $\mathrm{Pr}[a\bm{I}_p\preccurlyeq\bm{L}^{-1}\bm{A}\bm{L}^{-T}\preccurlyeq b\bm{I}_p]=\psi(a,b)$. Finally, since $a\bm{I}_p\preccurlyeq\bm{L}^{-1}\bm{A}\bm{L}^{-T}\preccurlyeq b\bm{I}_p$ if and only if $a\bm{\Sigma}\preccurlyeq\bm{A}\preccurlyeq b\bm{\Sigma}$ (this follows from Observation 7.1.8 of (Horn & Johnson, 2013)), we obtain $\eqref{4}$.

Notice that $\eqref{4}$ is no longer expressed in terms of eigenvalues of $\bm{A}$, but only expresses the probability that $\bm{A}$ is bounded by two matrices. This could be useful for formulating chance constraints on a positive definite matrix in convex optimization.

Thanks to Abhishek Goudar for reading a draft of this.

References

• Boyd, Stephen and Lieven Vandenberghe (2004). Convex Optimization. Cambridge University Press. (Freely available here.)
• Chiani, M. (2017). “On the Probability That All Eigenvalues of Gaussian, Wishart, and Double Wishart Random Matrices Lie Within an Interval,” in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 63, no. 7, pp. 4521–4531, July 2017, doi: 10.1109/TIT.2017.2694846, arxiv: 1502.04189.
• Horn, Roger A. and Charles R. Johnson (2013). Matrix Analysis. Cambridge University Press.