A HOMOGENEITY TEST OF LARGE DIMENSIONAL COVARIANCE MATRICES UNDER NON-NORMALITY

A test statistic for homogeneity of two or more covariance matrices is presented when the distributions may be non-normal and the dimension may exceed the sample size. Using the Frobenius norm of the difference of null and alternative hypotheses, the statistic is constructed as a linear combination of consistent, location-invariant, estimators of trace functions that constitute the norm. These estimators are defined as U-statistics and the corresponding theory is exploited to derive the normal limit of the statistic under a few mild assumptions as both sample size and dimension grow large. Simulations are used to assess the accuracy of the statistic.