Some improvements for existing simple Approximations of the Normal Distribution Function

Abstract

Due to the widespread applicability and use of the normal distribution, a need has arisen to approximate its cumulative distribution function (cdf). In this article, five new simple approximations to the standard normal cdf are developed. In order to assess the accuracy of the proposed approximations, both maximum absolute error and mean absolute error were used.  The maximum absolute errors of the proposed approximations lie between 0.00095 and 0.00946, which is highly accurate if compared to the existing simple approximations and quite sufficient for many real-life applications. Even though simple approximations may not as accurate as complicated ones, they are, though, fairly good when judged vis-a-vis their simplicity.