Hiring in life sciences? Share your open positions with our professional community. Read more Close

Advertisement

Better together: Cross and joint covariances enhance signal detectability in undersampled data.

Created on 17 Oct 2026

Authors

Arabind Swain, Sean Alexander Ridout, Ilya Nemenman

Published in

Physical review. E. Volume 114. Issue 3-2. Pages 035305.

Abstract

Many data-science applications involve detecting a shared signal between two high-dimensional variables. Using random matrix theory methods, we determine when such a signal can be detected and reconstructed from sample correlations, despite the background of sampling-noise-induced correlations. We consider three different covariance matrices constructed from two high-dimensional variables: their individual self-covariance, their unwhitened cross-covariance as used in partial least squares (PLS), and the self-covariance of the concatenated (joint) variable, which incorporates the self- and the cross-correlation blocks. We observe the expected Baik, Ben Arous, and Péché detectability phase transition in all these covariance matrices, and we show that joint- and cross-covariance matrices always reconstruct the shared signal earlier than the self-covariances. Whether the joint or the cross approach is better depends on the mismatch of dimensionalities between the variables. We discuss what these observations mean for choosing the right method for detecting linear correlations in data and how these findings may generalize to nonlinear statistical dependencies.

PMID:
42888652
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 17 Oct 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Community rating n/a 0 votes
  • Reviewers' rating n/a 0 votes
  • Your rating

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 8
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement