Conjugate distribution
Suppose we wish to make inference about a covariance matrix
whose prior
has a
distribution. If the observations
are independent p-variate Gaussian variables drawn from a
distribution, then the conditional distribution
has a
distribution, where
.
Because the prior and posterior distributions are the same family, we say the inverse Wishart distribution is conjugate to the multivariate Gaussian.
Due to its conjugacy to the multivariate Gaussian, it is possible to marginalize out (integrate out) the Gaussian's parameter
, using the formula
and the linear algebra identity
:

(this is useful because the variance matrix
is not known in practice, but because
is known a priori, and
can be obtained from the data, the right hand side can be evaluated directly). The inverse-Wishart distribution as a prior can be constructed via existing transferred prior knowledge. [5]
Moments
The following is based on Press, S. J. (1982) "Applied Multivariate Analysis", 2nd ed. (Dover Publications, New York), after reparameterizing the degree of freedom to be consistent with the p.d.f. definition above.
Let
with
and
, so that
.
The mean, for
: [4] : 91

The variance of each element of
:

The variance of the diagonal uses the same formula as above with
, which simplifies to:

The covariance of elements of
are given by:

The same results are expressed in Kronecker product form by von Rosen [6] as follows:

where

commutation matrix 
There appears to be a typo in the paper whereby the coefficient of
is given as
rather than
, and that the expression for the mean square inverse Wishart, corollary 3.1, should read

To show how the interacting terms become sparse when the covariance is diagonal, let
and introduce some arbitrary parameters
:

where
denotes the matrix vectorization operator. Then the second moment matrix becomes

which is non-zero only when involving the correlations of diagonal elements of
, all other elements are mutually uncorrelated, though not necessarily statistically independent. The variances of the Wishart product are also obtained by Cook et al. [7] in the singular case and, by extension, to the full rank case.
Muirhead [8] shows in Theorem 3.2.8 that if
is distributed as
and
is an arbitrary vector, independent of
then
and
, one degree of freedom being relinquished by estimation of the sample mean in the latter. Similarly, Bodnar et.al. further find that
and setting
the marginal distribution of the leading diagonal element is thus

and by rotating
end-around a similar result applies to all diagonal elements
.
A corresponding result in the complex Wishart case was shown by Brennan and Reed [9] and the uncorrelated inverse complex Wishart
was shown by Shaman [10] to have diagonal statistical structure in which the leading diagonal elements are correlated, while all other element are uncorrelated.