An Introduction to Wishart Matrix Moments Adrian N. Bishop1, Pierre Del Moral2 and Angèle Niclas3 1University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and CSIRO, Australia;
[email protected] 2INRIA, Bordeaux Research Center, France;
[email protected] 3École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France ABSTRACT These lecture notes provide a comprehensive, self-contained introduction to the analysis of Wishart matrix moments. This study may act as an introduction to some particular aspects of random matrix theory, or as a self-contained exposition of Wishart matrix moments. Random matrix theory plays a central role in statistical physics, computational mathematics and engineering sci- ences, including data assimilation, signal processing, combi- natorial optimization, compressed sensing, econometrics and mathematical finance, among numerous others. The mathe- matical foundations of the theory of random matrices lies at the intersection of combinatorics, non-commutative algebra, geometry, multivariate functional and spectral analysis, and of course statistics and probability theory. As a result, most of the classical topics in random matrix theory are technical, and mathematically difficult to penetrate for non-experts and regular users and practitioners. The technical aim of these notes is to review and extend some important results in random matrix theory in the specific Adrian N. Bishop, Pierre Del Moral and Angèle Niclas (2018), “An Introduction to Wishart Matrix Moments”, Foundations and Trends R in Machine Learning: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp 97–218. DOI: 10.1561/2200000072. 2 context of real random Wishart matrices. This special class of Gaussian-type sample covariance matrix plays an impor- tant role in multivariate analysis and in statistical theory.