An improvement of the Berry–Esseen inequality with applications to Poisson and mixed Poisson random sums

Abstract

By a modification of the method that was applied in study of Korolev & Shevtsova (2009), here the inequalities and are proved for the uniform distance ρ(F n ,Φ) between the standard normal distribution function Φ and the distribution function F n of the normalized sum of an arbitrary number n≥1 of independent identically distributed random variables with zero mean, unit variance, and finite third absolute moment β3. The first of these two inequalities is a structural improvement of the classical Berry–Esseen inequality and as well sharpens the best known upper estimate of the absolute constant in the classical Berry–Esseen inequality since 0.33477(β3+0.429)≤0.33477(1+0.429)β3<0.4784β3 by virtue of the condition β3≥1. The latter inequality is applied to lowering the upper estimate of the absolute constant in the analog of the Berry–Esseen inequality for Poisson random sums to 0.3041 which is strictly less than the least possible value 0.4097… of the absolute constant in the classical Berry–Esseen inequality. As corollaries, the estimates of the rate of convergence in limit theorems for compound mixed Poisson distributions are refined.