High dimensional limit theorems and matrix decompositions on the Stiefel manifold

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate high dimensional limiting behaviors, as m becomes infinite (m → ∞), of matrix statistics on the Stiefel manifold V_{k, m}, which consists of m × k (m ≥ k) matrices X such that X′X = I_k. The results extend those of Watson. Let X be a random matrix on V_{k, m}. We present a matrix decomposition of X as the sum of mutually orthogonal singular value decompositions of the projections PX and PX, where and are each a subspace of R^m of dimension p and their orthogonal compliment, respectively (p ≥ k and m ≥ k + p). Based on this decomposition of X, the invariant measure on V_{k, m} is expressed as the product of the measures on the component subspaces. Some distributions related to these decompositions are obtained for some population distributions on V_{k, m}. We show the limiting normalities, as m → ∞, of some matrix statistics derived from the uniform distribution and the distributions having densities of the general forms f(PX) and f(m^1/2PX) on V_{k, m}. Subsequently, applications of these high dimensional limit theorems are considered in some testing problems.