The lower tail probability of the noncentral
-distribution with
degrees of freedom and noncentrality parameter
,
, is defined by
where
is a central
-distribution with
degrees of freedom.
The value of
at which the Poisson weight,
, is greatest is determined and the summation
(1) is made forward and backward from that value of
.
The recursive relationship:
is used during the summation in
(1).
The summations described in
Section 3 are made until an upper bound on the truncation error relative to the current summation value is less than
tol.
The number of terms in
(1) required for a given accuracy will depend on the following factors:
-
(i)The rate at which the Poisson weights tend to zero. This will be slower for larger values of .
-
(ii)The rate at which the central probabilities tend to zero. This will be slower for larger values of and .