Arijit Chakrabarty

Understanding Heavy Tails in a Bounded World or, is a Truncated Heavy Tail Heavy or Not?

We address the important question of the extent to which random variables and vectors with truncated power tails retain the characteristic features of random variables and vectors with power tails. We define two truncation regimes, soft truncation regime and hard truncation regime, and show that, in the soft truncation regime, truncated power tails behave, in important respects, as if no truncation took place. On the other hand, in the hard truncation regime much of “heavy tailedness” is lost. We show how to estimate consistently the tail exponent when the tails are truncated, and suggest statistical tests to decide on whether the truncation is soft or hard. Finally, we apply our methods to two recent data sets arising from computer networks.

From random matrices to long range dependence

Random matrices whose entries come from a stationary Gaussian process are studied. The limiting behavior of the eigenvalues as the size of the matrix goes to infinity is the main subject of interest in this work. It is shown that the limiting spectral distribution is determined by the absolutely continuous component of the spectral measure of the stationary process. This is similar to the situation where the entries of the matrix are i.i.d. On the other hand, the discrete component contributes to the limiting behavior of the eigenvalues after a different scaling. Therefore, this helps to define a boundary between short and long range dependence of a stationary Gaussian process in the context of random matrices.