On closeness of two discrete weighted sums

Abstract

The effect that weighted summands have on each other in approximations of $S={w_{1}}{S_{1}}+{w_{2}}{S_{2}}+\cdots +{w_{N}}{S_{N}}$ is investigated. Here, ${S_{i}}$’s are sums of integer-valued random variables, and ${w_{i}}$ denote weights, $i=1,\dots ,N$. Two cases are considered: the general case of independent random variables when their closeness is ensured by the matching of factorial moments and the case when the ${S_{i}}$ has the Markov Binomial distribution. The Kolmogorov metric is used to estimate the accuracy of approximation.

Keywords

• characteristic function
• concentration function
• factorial moments
• Kolmogorov metric
• Markov Binomial distribution
• weighted random variables