On the Tails of the Distribution of the Sum of Lognormals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Finding the distribution of the sum of lognormal random variables is an important mathematical problem in wireless communications, as well as in many other fields. While several methods exist to approximate this distribution, their performance tends to deteriorate in both tails. Finding a good overall fit remains an open problem. Other disadvantages of these methods are their complexity and, in some cases, their limitation to particular scenarios. In this paper we examine the sum of independent lognormal random variables with arbitrary parameters. We define the concept of best lognormal fit to a tail and show what it means in terms of convergence. We restate a known result about asymptotes to the higher tail of the distribution. To our knowledge, the lower tail has not yet been studied. We give a simple closed-form expression for an asymptote to the lower tail. We also show that known methods for finding the sum of lognormals use distribution functions that do not have this asymptotic behaviour in the tails. Our results are complementary to the existing knowledge, which together can combine to solve the problem of the sum of lognormals simply and exactly. We support our results by simulations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".