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Poisson and Gaussian approximations of the power divergence family of statistics

Abstract

Consider the family of power divergence statistics based on nn trials, each leading to one of rr possible outcomes. This includes the log-likelihood ratio and Pearson's statistic as important special cases. It is known that in certain regimes (e.g., when rr is of order n2n^2 and the allocation is asymptotically uniform as nn\to\infty) the power divergence statistic converges in distribution to a linear transformation of a Poisson random variable. We establish explicit error bounds in the Kolmogorov (or uniform) metric to complement this convergence result, which may be applied for any values of nn, rr and the index parameter λ\lambda for which such a finite-sample bound is meaningful. We further use this Poisson approximation result to derive error bounds in Gaussian approximation of the power divergence statistics.

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