Approximating characteristic function of bounded Pareto distribution with α=1

During the summer, I received an email from a researcher at university abroad inquiring about how we (myself and my senior colleague, prof. B. Kaulakys) derived the approximation for the characteristic function of bounded Pareto distribution (for the particular case with \( \alpha = 1 \)). The approximation was given in [1], but derivation turned out to be somewhat more involved than I remembered. Originally, I derived it with the help of Wolfram Engine, while my colleague consulted various mathematical formula compendiums. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any notes containing the derivation. So I have attempted to reconstruct a combined approach from scratch. You'll find the derivation below.

We are back for a new academic year (2026)!

So, we are back for a new academic year! Over the summer, our group continued reading books on statistics. Our summer readings, both old and new, has inspired a few posts that will be published on the blog soon. We hope you will find them enlightening!

Image illustrating the start of new academic year generated with
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Oh, and by the way, this September is our 21st September since we started Physics of Risk blog (if we include the 2006–2010 period when the posts were written in Lithuanian). 20 years have gone by!

Beta prime distribution from Gamma-distributed random values

As we have already discussed, beta prime distribution arises from a nonlinear transformation of the voter model. Furthermore, recently we have been relying a lot on the said transformation [1, 2, 3]. In those papers, we have been using some results derived for the CIR process as well. Thus, another interesting thing, which my colleague Rytis Kazakevičius has noted, was that the beta prime distribution can be obtained from the ratio of two independent Gamma-distributed random values. Why it is interesting? The stationary distribution of the CIR process is the Gamma distribution!

Beta prime distribution

Have you heard of the beta prime distribution before? Until recently, I hadn't either. My colleague, Rytis Kazakevičius, recently surprised me by pointing out that the distribution we have been repeatedly encountering in nonlinear transformations of the noisy voter model has actually a proper name. It is known as the beta prime distribution. And our history with this distribution, goes back much further.