Another Marcenko-Pastur law for Kendall's tau

Abstract

Bandeira et al. (2017) show that the eigenvalues of the Kendall correlation matrix of $n$ i.i.d. random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^p$ are asymptotically distributed like $1/3 + (2/3)Y_q$, where $Y_q$ has a Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law with parameter $q=\lim(p/n)$ if $p, n\to\infty$ proportionately to one another. Here we show that another Mar\v{c}enko-Pastur law emerges in the "ultra-high dimensional" scaling limit where $p\sim q'\, n^2/2$ for some $q'>0$: in this quadratic scaling regime, Kendall correlation eigenvalues converge weakly almost surely to $(1/3)Y_{q'}$.