A Geometric Unification of Distributionally Robust Covariance Estimators: Shrinking the Spectrum by Inflating the Ambiguity Set

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: A Geometric Unification of Distributionally Robust Covariance Estimators: Shrinking the Spectrum by Inflating the Ambiguity Set
المؤلفون: Yue, Man-Chung, Rychener, Yves, Kuhn, Daniel, Nguyen, Viet Anh
سنة النشر: 2024
المجموعة: Computer Science
Mathematics
Statistics
مصطلحات موضوعية: Statistics - Machine Learning, Computer Science - Machine Learning, Mathematics - Optimization and Control
الوصف: The state-of-the-art methods for estimating high-dimensional covariance matrices all shrink the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix towards a data-insensitive shrinkage target. The underlying shrinkage transformation is either chosen heuristically - without compelling theoretical justification - or optimally in view of restrictive distributional assumptions. In this paper, we propose a principled approach to construct covariance estimators without imposing restrictive assumptions. That is, we study distributionally robust covariance estimation problems that minimize the worst-case Frobenius error with respect to all data distributions close to a nominal distribution, where the proximity of distributions is measured via a divergence on the space of covariance matrices. We identify mild conditions on this divergence under which the resulting minimizers represent shrinkage estimators. We show that the corresponding shrinkage transformations are intimately related to the geometrical properties of the underlying divergence. We also prove that our robust estimators are efficiently computable and asymptotically consistent and that they enjoy finite-sample performance guarantees. We exemplify our general methodology by synthesizing explicit estimators induced by the Kullback-Leibler, Fisher-Rao, and Wasserstein divergences. Numerical experiments based on synthetic and real data show that our robust estimators are competitive with state-of-the-art estimators.
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20124
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2405.20124
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv