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Article
On approximating point spread distributions
Journal of Statistical Computation & Simulation (2010)
  • Tamas Lengyel, Occidental College
Abstract

We discuss some properties of the point spread distribution, defined as the distribution of the difference of two independent binomial random variables with the same parameter n in- cluding exact and approximate probabilities and related optimization issues. We use various approximation techniques for different distributions, special functions, and analytic, combi- natorial and symbolic methods, such as multi-summation techniques. We prove that in case of unequal success rates, if these rates change with their difference kept fix and small, and n is appropriately bounded, then the point spread distribution only slightly changes for small point differences. We also prove that for equal success rates p, the probability of a tie is min- imized if p = 1/2. Numerical examples are included for the case with n = 12.

Keywords
  • Skellam distribution,
  • approximating distributions,
  • asymptotic enumeration,
  • special functions,
  • multi-summation
Disciplines
Publication Date
April 6, 2010
Citation Information
Tamas Lengyel. "On approximating point spread distributions" Journal of Statistical Computation & Simulation (2010)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tamas_lengyel/10/