Posterior asymptotics of high-dimensional spiked covariance model with inverse-Wishart prior

Abstract: We consider Bayesian inference on the spiked eigenstructures of high-dimensional covariance matrices; specifically, we focus on estimating the eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of high-dimensional covariance matrices in which a few eigenvalues are significantly larger than the rest. We impose an inverse-Wishart prior distribution on the unknown covariance matrix and derive the posterior distributions of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors by transforming the posterior distribution of the covariance matrix. We prove that the posterior distribution of the spiked eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors converges to the true parameters under the spiked high-dimensional covariance assumption, and also that the posterior distribution of the spiked eigenvector attains the minimax optimality under the single spiked covariance model. Simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms all existing methods in quantifying uncertainty.