Calibrated Precision Matrix Estimation for High-Dimensional Elliptical Distributions

Abstract

We propose a semiparametric method for estimating a precision matrix of high-dimensional elliptical distributions. Unlike most existing methods, our method naturally handles heavy tailness and conducts parameter estimation under a calibration framework, thus achieves improved theoretical rates of convergence and finite sample performance on heavy-tail applications. We further demonstrate the performance of the proposed method using thorough numerical experiments.