CALCULATION OF MULTIVARIATE NORMAL PROBABILITIES—ANOTHER SPECIAL CASE

The problem of calculating orthant probabilities for sets of variables (X₁,., X_n) is considered in the case where they are jointly normally distributed with zero means and a correlation matrix such that the correlation between X_i and X_i is zero if |i-j|> 1. An effective method is given which works for quite large n when the correlations between X_i and X_i+1 have the values 1/2, 2/5, 3/10, 4/17, 5/26,. and more approximate methods are given for other values. The accuracy is investigated numerically.