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Compound poisson approximations for the numbers of extreme spacings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2016

Małgorzata Roos*
Affiliation:
University of Zurich
*
* Postal address: Institut für Angewandte Mathematik, Rämistr. 74, CH-8001 Zürich, Switzerland. E-mail address: [email protected]

Abstract

The accuracy of the Poisson approximation to the distribution of the numbers of large and small m-spacings, when n points are placed at random on the circle, was analysed using the Stein–Chen method in Barbour et al. (1992b). The Poisson approximation for m≧2 was found not to be as good as for 1-spacings. In this paper, rates of approximation of these distributions to suitable compound Poisson distributions are worked out, using the CP–Stein–Chen method and an appropriate coupling argument. The rates are better than for Poisson approximation for m≧2, and are of order O((log n)2/n) for large m-spacings and of order O(1/n) for small m-spacings, for any fixed m≧2, if the expected number of spacings is held constant as n → ∞.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 1993 

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Footnotes

This work was supported in part by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds Grants Nos 21–25579.88 and 20–31262.91.

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