Compound Poisson approximation and testing for gene clusters with multigene families.

We present in this article a compound Poisson approximation for computing probabilities involved in significance tests for conserved genomic regions between different species. We consider the case when the conserved genomic regions are found by the reference region approach. An important aspect of our computations is the fact that we are taking into account the existence of multigene families. We obtain convergence results for the error of our approximation by using the Stein-Chen method for compound Poisson approximation.