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The problem of testing the equality of mean vectors for high-dimensional data has been intensively investigated in the literature. However, most of the existing tests impose strong assumptions on the underlying group covariance matrices which may not be satisfied or hardly be checked in practice. In this article, an F-type test for two-sample Behrens–Fisher problems for high-dimensional data is proposed and studied. When the two samples are normally distributed and when the null hypothesis is valid, the proposed F-type test statistic is shown to be an F-type mixture, a ratio of two independent χ 2 -type mixtures. Under some regularity conditions and the null hypothesis, it is shown that the proposed F-type test statistic and the above F-type mixture have the same normal and non-normal limits. It is then justified to approximate the null distribution of the proposed F-type test statistic by that of the F-type mixture, resulting in the so-called normal reference F-type test. Since the F-type mixture is a ratio of two independent χ 2 -type mixtures, we employ the Welch–Satterthwaite χ 2 -approximation to the distributions of the numerator and the denominator of the F-type mixture respectively, resulting in an approximation F-distribution whose degrees of freedom can be consistently estimated from the data. The asymptotic power of the proposed F-type test is established. Two simulation studies are conducted and they show that in terms of size control, the proposed F-type test outperforms two existing competitors. The good performance of the proposed F-type test is also illustrated by a COVID-19 data example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For high-dimensional two-sample Behrens–Fisher problems, several non-scale-invariant and scale-invariant tests have been proposed. Most of them impose strong assumptions on the underlying group covariance matrices so that their test statistics are asymptotically normal. However, in practice, these assumptions may not be satisfied or hardly be checked so that these tests may not be able to maintain the nominal size well in practice. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper, a normal reference scale-invariant test is proposed and studied. It works well by neither imposing strong assumptions on the underlying group covariance matrices nor assuming their equality. It is shown that under some regularity conditions and the null hypothesis, the proposed test and a chi-square-type mixture have the same normal and non-normal limiting distributions. It is then justifiable to approximate the null distribution of the proposed test using that of the chi-square-type mixture. The distribution of the chi-square type mixture can be well approximated by the Welch–Satterthwaite chi-square-approximation with the approximation parameter consistently estimated from the data. The asymptotic power of the proposed test is established. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed test has much better size control and power than several well-known non-scale-invariant and scale-invariant tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Testing the equality of the covariance matrices of two high-dimensional samples is a fundamental inference problem in statistics. Several tests have been proposed but they are either too liberal or too conservative when the required assumptions are not satisfied which attests that they are not always applicable in real data analysis. To overcome this difficulty, a normal-reference test is proposed and studied in this paper. It is shown that under some regularity conditions and the null hypothesis, the proposed test statistic and a chi-squared-type mixture have the same limiting distribution. It is then justified to approximate the null distribution of the proposed test statistic using that of the chi-squared-type mixture. The distribution of the chi-squared-type mixture can be well approximated using a three-cumulant matched chi-squared-approximation with its approximation parameters consistently estimated from the data. The asymptotic power of the proposed test under a local alternative is also established. Simulation studies and a real data example demonstrate that the proposed test works well in general scenarios and outperforms the existing competitors substantially in terms of size control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the general linear hypothesis testing problem for high-dimensional data, several interesting tests have been proposed in the literature. Most of them have imposed strong assumptions on the underlying covariance matrix so that their test statistics under the null hypothesis are asymptotically normally distributed. In practice, however, these strong assumptions may not be satisfied or hardly be checked so that these tests are often applied blindly in real data analysis. Their empirical sizes may then be much larger or smaller than the nominal size. For these tests, this is a size control problem which cannot be overcome via purely increasing the sample size to infinity. To overcome this difficulty, in this paper, a new normal-reference test using the centralized L 2 -norm based test statistic with three cumulant matched chi-square approximation is proposed and studied. Some theoretical discussion and two simulation studies demonstrate that in terms of size control, the new normal-reference test performs very well regardless of if the high-dimensional data are nearly uncorrelated, moderately correlated, or highly correlated and it outperforms two existing competitors substantially. Two real high-dimensional data examples motivate and illustrate the new normal-reference test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-dimensional data are frequently encountered with the development of modern data collection techniques. Testing the equality of the mean vectors of two high-dimensional samples with possibly different covariance matrices is usually referred to as a high-dimensional two-sample Behrens–Fisher (BF) problem. In the high-dimensional setting, the classical BF solutions are expected to perform poorly or become inapplicable due to the singularity of the sample covariance matrices. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to address this challenging issue but they all require strong regularity conditions on the underlying covariance matrices to guarantee that their test statistics are asymptotically normally distributed. To overcome this difficulty, an L 2 -norm-based test is proposed and studied in this article. It is shown that under some regularity conditions and the null hypothesis, the test statistic and a chi-square-type mixture have the same normal or non-normal limiting distribution. It is then natural to approximate the null distribution of the proposed test using that of the chi-square-type mixture, which is actually obtained from the proposed test statistic when the two high-dimensional samples are normally distributed. The resulting test is then referred to as a normal reference test. The distribution of the chi-square-type mixture can then be well approximated by the Welch–Satterthwaite χ 2 -approximation with the approximation parameters consistently estimated from the data. The asymptotic power of the proposed test is established. Good performance of the proposed test against several existing competitors is demonstrated via several simulation studies and illustrated by a real data example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]