Lo 2013 derived the following formula for the approximation of the sum of several correlated lognormal random variables by a lognormal distribution. \[ \begin{aligned} S_+ &= \operatorname{E}\left[\sum_i X_i \right] = \sum_i \operatorname{E}[X_i] = \sum_i e^{\mu_i + \sigma_i^2/2} \\ \sigma^2_{S} &= 1/S_+^2 \, \sum_{i,j} \operatorname{cor}_{ij} \sigma_i \sigma_j \operatorname{E}[X_i] \operatorname{E}[X_j] \\ &= 1/S_+^2 \, \sum_{i,j} \operatorname{cor}_{ij} \sigma_i \sigma_j e^{\mu_i + \sigma_i^2/2} e^{\mu_j + \sigma_j^2/2} \\ \mu_S &= \ln\left( S_+ \right) - \sigma_{S}^2/2 \end{aligned} \] where \(S_+\) is the expected value of the sum, i.e the sum of the expected values of the terms. \(\mu_s\) and \(\sigma_S\) are lognormal distribution parameters of the sum, \(\mu_i\) and \(\sigma_i\) are the lognormal distribution parameters of the added random variables, and \(\operatorname{cor}_{ij}\) is the correlation between two added random variables at log scale, which for time is computed from estimated autocorrelation \(\rho_k\).
This method is implemented with function estimateSumLognormal
, where the full correlation matrix is specified. For computational efficiency, the correlation length can be specified and correlations further apart will not contribute to the sum.