Neelesh Shankar Upadhye

In this paper, the problem of compound Poisson approximation to the convolution of compound negative binomial distributions, under total variation distance, is considered. First, we obtain an error bound using the method of exponents and it is compared with existing ones. It is known that Kerstan’s method is more powerful in compound approximation problems. We employ Kerstan’s method to obtain better estimates, using higher-order approximations. These bounds are of higher-order accuracy and improve upon some of the known results in the literature. Finally, an interesting application to risk theory is discussed.

In this paper, a new method based on probability generating functions is used to obtain multiple Stein operators for various random variables closely related to Poisson, binomial and negative binomial distributions. Also, the Stein operators for certain compound distributions, where the random summand satisfies Panjer's recurrence relation, are derived. A well-known perturbation approach for Stein's method is used to obtain total variation bounds for the distributions mentioned above. The importance of such approximations is illustrated, for example, by the binomial convoluted with Poisson approximation to sums of independent and dependent indicator random variables.