Products of ratios of gamma functions -- an application to the distribution of the test statistic for testing the equality of covariance matrices (Q2423530)

The author shows that, for a well-known hypothesis test for equality of covariance matrices in samples drawn from multivariate normal populations, the characteristic function of $-\log\Lambda$ (where $\Lambda$ is the test statistic) may be written in terms of products of ratios of gamma functions. Using a new approximation for such ratios, an approximation for this characteristic function is developed and tested numerically.