Moment closure

To use moment closure, a level is chosen past which all cumulants are set to zero.

This leaves a resulting closed system of equations which can be solved for the moments.

[1] The moment closure approximation was first used by Goodman[2] and Whittle[3][4] who set all third and higher-order cumulants to be zero, approximating the population distribution with a normal distribution.

[1] In 2006, Singh and Hespanha proposed a closure which approximates the population distribution as a log-normal distribution to describe biochemical reactions.

[5] The approximation has been used successfully to model the spread of the Africanized bee in the Americas,[6] nematode infection in ruminants.