Double verification for two‐sample covariance matrices test

Abstract

This paper explores testing the equality of two covariance matrices under high‐dimensional settings. Existing test statistics are usually constructed based on the squared Frobenius norm or the elementwise maximum norm. However, the former may experience power loss when handling sparse alternatives, while the latter may have a poor performance against dense alternatives. In this paper, with a novel framework, we introduce a double verification test statistic designed to be powerful against both dense and sparse alternatives. Additionally, we propose an adaptive weight test statistic to enhance power. Furthermore, we present an analysis of the asymptotic size and power of the proposed test. Simulation results demonstrate the satisfactory performance of our proposed method.