Testing the order of a population spectral distribution for high-dimensional data

Large covariance matrices play a fundamental role in various high-dimensional statistics. Investigating the limiting behavior of the eigenvalues can reveal informative structures of large covariance matrices, which is particularly important in high-dimensional principal component analysis and covariance matrix estimation. In this paper, we propose a framework to test the number of distinct population eigenvalues for large covariance matrices, i.e. the order of a Population Spectral Distribution. The limiting distribution of our test statistic for a Population Spectral Distribution of order 2 is developed along with its (N,p)(N,p) consistency, which is clearly demonstrated in our simulation study. We also apply our test to two classical microarray datasets.