Local limit approximations for Markov population processes

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the equilibrium distribution $Π_n$ of the $n$-th element in a sequence of continuous-time density dependent Markov processes on the integers. Under a $(2+\a)$-th moment condition on the jump distributions, we establish a bound of order $O(n^{-(\a+1)/2}\sqrt{\log n})$ on the difference between the point probabilities of $Π_n$ and those of a translated Poisson distribution with the same variance. Except for the factor $\sqrt{\log n}$, the result is as good as could be obtained in the simpler setting of sums of independent integer-valued random variables. Our arguments are based on the Stein-Chen method and coupling.