A unified framework for correlation mining in ultra-high dimension

An important problem in large scale inference is the identification of variables that have large correlations or partial correlations. Recent work has yielded breakthroughs in the ultra-high dimensional setting when the sample size $n$ is fixed and the dimension $p \rightarrow \infty$ ([Hero, Rajaratnam 2011, 2012]). Despite these advances, the correlation screening framework suffers from some serious practical, methodological and theoretical deficiencies. For instance, theoretical safeguards for partial correlation screening requires that the population covariance matrix be block diagonal. This block sparsity assumption is however highly restrictive in numerous practical applications. As a second example, results for correlation and partial correlation screening framework requires the estimation of dependence measures or functionals, which can be highly prohibitive computationally. In this paper, we propose a unifying approach to correlation and partial correlation mining which specifically goes beyond the block diagonal correlation structure, thus yielding a methodology that is suitable for modern applications. By making connections to random geometric graphs, the number of highly correlated or partial correlated variables are shown to have novel compound Poisson finite-sample characterizations, which hold for both the finite $p$ case and when $p \rightarrow \infty$. The unifying framework also demonstrates an important duality between correlation and partial correlation screening with important theoretical and practical consequences.