Empirical likelihood method for complete independence test on high-dimensional data

Given a random sample of size n from a p dimensional random vector, we are interested in testing whether the p components of the random vector are mutually independent. This is the so-called complete independence test. In the multivariate normal case, it is equivalent to testing whether the correlation matrix is an identity matrix. In this paper, we propose a one-sided empirical likelihood method for the complete independence test based on squared sample correlation coefficients. The limiting distribution for our one-sided empirical likelihood test statistic is proved to be (Formula presented.) when both n and p tend to infinity, where Z is a standard normal random variable. In order to improve the power of the empirical likelihood test statistic, we also introduce a rescaled empirical likelihood test statistic. We carry out an extensive simulation study to compare the performance of the rescaled empirical likelihood method and two other statistics.