The penultimate form of approximation to normal extremes

Abstract

Let Yn denote the largest of n independent N(0,1) random variables. It is shown that the error in approximating the distribution of Yn by the type III extreme value distribution exp {– (–Ax + B) k }, k > 0, is uniformly of order (log n)–2 if and only if the constants A, B and k satisfy certain conditions. In particular, this holds for the penultimate form of Fisher and Tippett (1928). Furthermore, two sufficient conditions are given so that these results can be extended to a stationary Gaussian sequence.