Zero biasing and a discrete central limit theorem

Abstract

We introduce a new family of distributions to approximate $\mathbb {P}(W\in A)$ for $A\subset\{...,-2,-1,0,1,2,...\}$ and $W$ a sum of independent integer-valued random variables $ξ_1$, $ξ_2$, $...,$ $ξ_n$ with finite second moments, where, with large probability, $W$ is not concentrated on a lattice of span greater than 1. The well-known Berry--Esseen theorem states that, for $Z$ a normal random variable with mean $\mathbb {E}(W)$ and variance $\operatorname {Var}(W)$, $\mathbb {P}(Z\in A)$ provides a good approximation to $\mathbb {P}(W\in A)$ for $A$ of the form $(-\infty,x]$. However, for more general $A$, such as the set of all even numbers, the normal approximation becomes unsatisfactory and it is desirable to have an appropriate discrete, nonnormal distribution which approximates $W$ in total variation, and a discrete version of the Berry--Esseen theorem to bound the error. In this paper, using the concept of zero biasing for discrete random variables (cf. Goldstein and Reinert [J. Theoret. Probab. 18 (2005) 237--260]), we introduce a new family of discrete distributions and provide a discrete version of the Berry--Esseen theorem showing how members of the family approximate the distribution of a sum $W$ of integer-valued variables in total variation.