The aim of this paper is to investigate the spectral properties of sample covariance matrices under a more general population. We consider a class of matrices of the form [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a [Formula: see text] nonrandom matrix and [Formula: see text] is an [Formula: see text] matrix consisting of i.i.d standard complex entries. [Formula: see text] as [Formula: see text] while [Formula: see text] can be arbitrary but no smaller than [Formula: see text]. We first prove that under some mild assumptions, with probability 1, for all large [Formula: see text], there will be no eigenvalues in any closed interval contained in an open interval which is outside the supports of the limiting distributions for all sufficiently large [Formula: see text]. Then we get the strong convergence result for the extreme eigenvalues as an extension of Bai-Yin law.
Spectral density of sparse sample covariance matrices
