Two sample test for covariance matrices in ultra-high dimension

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new test for testing the equality of two population covariance matrices in the ultra-high dimensional setting that the dimension is much larger than the sizes of both of the two samples. Our proposed methodology relies on a data splitting procedure and a comparison of a set of well selected eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrices on the split data sets. Compared to the existing methods, our methodology is adaptive in the sense that (i). it does not require specific assumption (e.g., comparable or balancing, etc.) on the sizes of two samples; (ii). it does not need quantitative or structural assumptions of the population covariance matrices; (iii). it does not need the parametric distributions or the detailed knowledge of the moments of the two populations. Theoretically, we establish the asymptotic distributions of the statistics used in our method and conduct the power analysis. We justify that our method is powerful under very weak alternatives. We conduct extensive numerical simulations and show that our method significantly outperforms the existing ones both in terms of size and power. Analysis of two real data sets is also carried out to demonstrate the usefulness and superior performance of our proposed methodology. An $\texttt{R}$ package $\texttt{UHDtst}$ is developed for easy implementation of our proposed methodology.