A New One-term Approximation to the Standard Normal Distribution

Abstract

This paper deals with a new, simple one-term approximation to the cumulative distribution function (c.d.f) of the standard normal distribution which does not have closed form representation. The accuracy of the proposed approximation measured using maximum absolute error (M.S.E) and the same criteria is used to compare this approximation with the existing one-term approximation approaches available in the literature. Our approximation has a maximum absolute error of about 0.0016 and this accuracy is sufficient for most practical applications.