The Erdős-Rényi law in distribution, for coin tossing and sequence matching (Q749471)

Starting from an analysis of DNA sequences in molecular biology, the authors are interested in approximations to the distributions of unusually rich matches between two independent sequences of independent, identically distributed letters from finite alphabets. These approximations are described in terms of corresponding distributional results for unusually head-rich regions found in a single random sequence of i.i.d. p-coin tosses. Bounds on the respective total variation distances are derived which converge to zero faster than some negative power of mn, the total number of pairs taken from the two alphabets. The key tools used are large deviation inequalities and the Chen-Stein method of Poisson approximation [\textit{L. H. Y. Chen}, Ann. Probab. 3, 534-545 (1975; Zbl 0335.60016), and \textit{C. M. Stein}, Approximate computation of expectations (1986)].