An investigation into the law of small numbers using R

Authors

  • Yasir Zubayr Barlas University of London
  • Stark Dudley University of London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33043/H7xEFx2HMG

Abstract

The Law of Small Numbers states that the Binomial distribution converges to the Poisson distribution. Using the programming language R, we investigate the total variation distance between Binomial(n, c/n) and Poisson(c) when we fix c and n individually. We also look at the asymptotics for ndTV for a fixed c, where ndTV is the total variation distance dTV multiplied by increasing values of n. Several properties of dTV are looked at in this paper.

Author Biographies

Yasir Zubayr Barlas, University of London

Yasir Zubayr Barlas pursued his undergraduate studies in the field of mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London. His academic interests encompass various areas of mathematics, with a specific focus on probability and statistics. The research presented in this paper was carried out during his undergraduate years.

Stark Dudley, University of London

Dudley Stark received his Ph.D. from University of Southern California in 1994 and is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Mathematics and Probability at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests lie in the fields of probability and combinatorics. He enjoys teaching a variety of modules in financial mathematics, statistics, and pure mathematics.

References

Bortkiewicz, L. von. (1898) Das Gesetz der kleinen Zahlen [The law of small numbers]. Available at: https://archive.org/details/ dasgesetzderklei00bortrich/.

Quine M. P. and Seneta E. (1987) Bortkiewicz’s data and the law of small numbers. International Statistical Review / Revue Internationale de Statistique, 55(2):173–181, 1987.

Sason, I. (2018) On f-divergences: Integral representations, local behavior, and inequalities. Entropy, 20(5):383.

R Core Team. (2021) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Ruckdeschel P., Kohl M., Stabla T. and Camphausen F. (2006) S4 classes for distributions. R News, 6(2):10-13.

Kennedy, J. E., and Quine, M. P. (1989) The total variation distance between the binomial and Poisson distributions. The Annals of Probability, 17(1).

Prokhorov, Yu. V. (1953) Asymptotic behavior of the binomial distribution. Uspekhi Mat. Nauk, 8(3(55)):135-142.

Black, P. E. (2019) little-o notation. Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures [online]. Available at: https://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/ littleOnotation.html.

de Bruijn, N. G. (1981) Asymptotic Methods in Analysis. Bibliotheca mathematica, Dover Publications.

Murray, J. D. (1984) Asymptotic Analysis: Asymptotic expansions. Applied Mathematical Sciences, 48:1-18.

Downloads

Published

2026-03-03

How to Cite

Barlas, Y. Z., & Dudley, S. (2026). An investigation into the law of small numbers using R. Mathematics Exchange, 17(1), 2–14. https://doi.org/10.33043/H7xEFx2HMG