Bandable Cumulant Tensors: Optimal Estimation and Applications in Non-Gaussian Data Modeling

Abstract

Higher-order cumulants capture the non-Gaussian dependence that covariance misses, but they are hard to use in high dimensions. An order-$d$ cumulant tensor has $p^d$ entries, and the plug-in sample cumulant is generally not even rate-optimal under the tensor spectral norm. For ordered data, both difficulties admit one remedy: assuming that higher-order interactions decay away from the main tensor diagonal, we introduce a bandable cumulant class and a tapered sample cumulant estimator that computes only $O(pk^{d-1})$ local entries at bandwidth $k$ and never forms the full tensor. Under exponential-type tail conditions, we prove nonasymptotic spectral-norm bounds that separate tapering bias from stochastic error, and a minimax lower bound over the same class that matches the leading bias and stochastic terms of the upper bound; for sub-Gaussian observations, the tapered estimator attains the minimax rate whenever $n\gg(k+\log p)^{d-1}$ at the oracle bandwidth $k$, with the ambient dimension entering only through $\log p$. Localization also suppresses the higher-order fluctuations behind this suboptimality, so tapering plays a stronger role here than in bandable covariance estimation. The spectral-norm guarantee transfers directly to downstream tasks, yielding plug-in error bounds for cumulant Yule--Walker estimation in autoregressive models, minimum-distance estimation in moving-average models, and matched-filter source localization in sensor arrays. Simulations corroborate the theory, and real-data analyses of RR-interval, air-quality, and Neuropixels recordings illustrate the resulting stability gains.