Spectra of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices under scale-mixture dependence

Abstract

We study the asymptotic spectral properties of high-dimensional Spearman correlation matrices for scale-mixture data. We consider observations of the form $x_t=σ_t ξ_t \in \mathbb{R}^N,$ where the coordinates of $ξ_t$ are i.i.d.\ and the scalar mixture variable $σ_t$ is shared by all coordinates. Under natural symmetry assumptions, the coordinates of $x_t$ are pairwise uncorrelated in both the Pearson and Spearman sense. Nevertheless, they are not independent when the mixture variable is non-degenerate. We show that this higher-order dependence survives the rank transformation and leaves a nontrivial spectral signature. In the proportional regime $N/T\to q\in(0,\infty),$ the empirical spectral distribution of the Spearman correlation matrix converges almost surely to a generalized Marčenko--Pastur law governed by the limiting distribution of an effective rank variance. We also formulate a broader latent-variable extension, which covers, in particular, some scale-mixture models with correlated directional components. We discuss solvable examples and numerical approximations, motivated in part by heavy-tailed data in robust multivariate statistics, econometrics, and finance.