AISM 52, 215-230
(Received September 29, 1997; revised November 10, 1998)
Abstract. There are a number of cases where the moments of a distribution are easily obtained, but theoretical distributions are not available in closed form. This paper shows how to use moment methods to approximate a theoretical univariate distribution with mixtures of known distributions. The methods are illustrated with gamma mixtures. It is shown that for a certain class of mixture distributions, which include the normal and gamma mixture families, one can solve for a p-point mixing distribution such that the corresponding mixture has exactly the same first 2p moments as the targeted univariate distribution. The gamma mixture approximation to the distribution of a positive weighted sums of independent central chi2 variables is demonstrated and compared with a number of existing approximations. The numerical results show that the new approximation is generally superior to these alternatives.
Key words and phrases: Cumulants, cumulative distribution function, gamma mixtures, mixture distribution, moment matrix, p-point mixture, tail probability, weighted sums of chi-squares.