The thresholding covariance estimator has nice asymptotic properties for
estimating sparse large covariance matrices, but it often has negative
eigenvalues when used in real data analysis. To simultaneously achieve sparsity
and positive definiteness, we develop a positive definite β1β-penalized
covariance estimator for estimating sparse large covariance matrices. An
efficient alternating direction method is derived to solve the challenging
optimization problem and its convergence properties are established. Under weak
regularity conditions, non-asymptotic statistical theory is also established
for the proposed estimator. The competitive finite-sample performance of our
proposal is demonstrated by both simulation and real applications.Comment: accepted by JASA, August 201