On approximating the distribution of indefinite quadratic forms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a simple methodology for approximating the distribution of indefinite quadratic forms in normal random variables. It is shown that the density function of a positive definite quadratic form can be approximated in terms of the product of a gamma density function and a polynomial. An extension which makes use of a generalized gamma density function is also considered. Such representations are based on the moments of a quadratic form, which can be determined from its cumulants by means of a recursive formula. After expressing an indefinite quadratic form as the difference of two positive definite quadratic forms, one can obtain an approximation to its density function by means of the transformation of variable technique. An explicit representation of the resulting density approximant is given in terms of a degenerate hypergeometric function. An easily implementable algorithm is provided. The proposed approximants produce very accurate percentiles over the entire range of the distribution. Several numerical examples illustrate the results. In particular, the methodology is applied to the Durbin–Watson statistic which is expressible as the ratio of two quadratic forms in normal random variables. Quadratic forms being ubiquitous in statistics, the approximating technique introduced herewith has numerous potential applications. Some relevant computational considerations are also discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".