Spectral measure of heavy tailed band and covariance random matrices

Abstract

We study the asymptotic behavior of the appropriately scaled and possibly perturbed spectral measure $μ$ of large random real symmetric matrices with heavy tailed entries. Specifically, consider the N by N symmetric matrix $Y_N^σ$ whose (i,j) entry is $σ(i/N,j/N)X_{ij}$ where $(X_{ij}, 0<i<j+1<\infty)$ is an infinite array of i.i.d real variables with common distribution in the domain of attraction of an $α$-stable law, $0<α<2$, and $σ$ is a deterministic function. For a random diagonal $D_N$ independent of $Y_N^σ$ and with appropriate rescaling $a_N$, we prove that the distribution $μ$ of $a_N^{-1}Y_N^σ+ D_N$ converges in mean towards a limiting probability measure which we characterize. As a special case, we derive and analyze the almost sure limiting spectral density for empirical covariance matrices with heavy tailed entries.