Power law deformation of Wishart–Laguerre ensembles of random matrices

Abstract

We introduce a one-parameter deformation of the Wishart–Laguerre or chiral ensembles of positive definite random matrices with Dyson index β = 1,2 and 4. Our generalized model has a fat-tailed distribution while preserving the invariance under orthogonal, unitary or symplectic transformations. The spectral properties are derived analytically for finite matrix size N × M for all three values of β, in terms of the orthogonal polynomials of the standard Wishart–Laguerre ensembles. For large N in a certain double-scaling limit we obtain a generalized Marčenko–Pastur distribution on the macroscopic scale, and a generalized Bessel law at the hard edge which is shown to be universal. Both macroscopic and microscopic correlations exhibit power law tails, where the microscopic limit depends on β and the difference M−N. In the limit where our parameter governing the power law goes to infinity we recover the correlations of the Wishart–Laguerre ensembles. To illustrate these findings, the generalized Marčenko–Pastur distribution is shown to be in very good agreement with empirical data from financial covariance matrices.

Locations

• Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment - View
• Brunel University Research Archive (BURA) (Brunel University London) - View - PDF
• DataCite API - View