GAUSSIAN LIMITS FOR GENERALIZED SPACINGS

Nearest neighbor cells in R(d), d is an element of N, are used to define coefficients of divergence (phi-divergences) between continuous multivariate samples. For large sample sizes, such distances are shown to be asymptotically normal with a variance depending on the underlying point density. In d = 1, this extends classical central limit theory for sum functions of spacings. The general results yield central limit theorems for logarithmic k-spacings, information gain, log-likelihood ratios and the number of pairs of sample points within a fixed distance of each other.