Expressions for the distribution and percentiles of the sums and products of chi-squares

Linear combinations of central or non-central chi-squares occur naturally in a variety of contexts. The products of chi-squares occur when a variance has a chi-square prior and in electrical engineering. Here, we give expansions for their distribution and quantiles and also for the products of the powers of chi-squares, including ratios. These provide much more accurate approximations than those based on asymptotic normality. The larger the degrees of freedom or the larger the non-centrality parameters, the better the approximations. We give the first four terms of these expansions. These provide approximations with errors smaller by five magnitudes than those based on asymptotic normality or on Satterthwaite's approximation. His method matched the first two moments of the target and a multiple of a chi-square and is only a first-order approximation like that based on the central limit theorem. We show that it can be made second order by matching the first three moments. The appendices show how to obtain analytical expressions for the distribution of weighted sums of chi-squares.