Abstract
The role of the continuity correction of 1/2, when approximating discrete binomial probabilities with normal probabilities, is examined. It is shown that a substantial improvement is available, one that involves very little more computational effort (it can easily be performed on a pocket calculator), and gives big gains in accuracy.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Camp, B. (1951). Approximation to the point binomial,Ann. Math. Statist.,22, 130–131.
Cox, D. R. (1970). The continuity correction,Biometrika,57, 219.
Feller, W. (1945). On the normal approximation to the binomial distribution,Ann. Math. Statist.,16, 319–329.
Gebhardt, F. (1969). Some numerical comparisons of several approximations to the binomial distribution,J. Amer. Statist. Ass.,64, 1638–1646.
Johnson, N. and Kotz, S. (1969).Distributions in Statistics: Discrete Distributions, John Wiley and Sons, N.Y.
Molenaar, W. (1973). Simple approximations to the Poisson, binomial and hypergeometric distributions,Biometrics,29, 403–407.
Peizer, D. and Pratt, J. (1968). A normal approximation for binomial,F, beta and other common related tail probabilities, I,J. Amer. Statist. Ass.,63, 1417–1456.
Raff, M. S. (1956). On approximating the point binomial,J. Amer. Statist. Ass.,51, 293–303.
Yates, F. (1934). Contingency tables involving small numbers, and the χ2 test,J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Suppl.,1, 217–235.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
About this article
Cite this article
Cressie, N. A finely tuned continuity correction. Ann Inst Stat Math 30, 435–442 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02480234
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02480234