 How to poison Poisson (when approximating binomial tails)*W. Molenaar Statistica Neerlandica, 1969, vol. 23, issue 1, 19-40 Abstract: Summary In these days some sportsmen are given dangerous drugs in order to stimulate them into still higher efforts. The present paper wants to add some poison to the classical approximation of a binomial by a Poisson distribution. The relatively harmless drug of a little extra calculation shall be seen to result in a much better accuracy. This paper reports both on theoretical considerations, following from series expansions of Poisson‐type parameters, and on extensive numerical investigations of accuracy by means of an Electrologica X8 computer. The main conclusion is that the probability of at most k successes in n Bernoulli trials with success probability p 5 one should make p 5. In section 5 a series expansion for the exact Poisson parameter is derived. Two new parameters, among which is ζ, are introduced in section 6, where the series expansions for parameters given in table 4 lead to conclusions about the various approximations, summarized in table 6. The final section 7 gives some numerical results, which confirm to a large extent the conclusions from the asymptotic expansions. Date: 1969 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:stanee:v:23:y:1969:i:1:p:19-40 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Statistica Neerlandica is currently edited by Miroslav Ristic, Marijtje van Duijn and Nan van Geloven More articles in Statistica Neerlandica from Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research |
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