Stein’s method for the poisson–dirichlet distribution and the ewens sampling formula, with applications to Wright–Fisher models

Abstract

We provide a general theorem bounding the error in the approximation of a random measure of interest—for example, the empirical population measure of types in a Wright–Fisher model—and a Dirichlet process, which is a measure having Poisson–Dirichlet distributed atoms with i.i.d. labels from a diffuse distribution. The implicit metric of the approximation theorem captures the sizes and locations of the masses, and so also yields bounds on the approximation between the masses of the measure of interest and the Poisson–Dirichlet distribution. We apply the result to bound the error in the approximation of the stationary distribution of types in the finite Wright–Fisher model with infinite-allele..