ON THE ADMISSIBILITY OF FORMAL BAYES ESTIMATORS.

Abstract

This work is concerned with the admissibility of formal Bayes estimators. Loss is assumed to be squared error. Positive results concern the case where the underlying distribution is known up to a single unknown parameter which is assumed to lie in a possibly infinite subinterval of the real line. Sufficient conditions are given for the almost admissibility, with respect to a prior measure pi, of formal Bayes estimators (of real functions of that parameter) obtained from pi. These conditions are reasonably explicit and give some new results in examples involving a member of the one parameter exponential family and the case of a single unknown location parameter. Two negative results are obtained. Both involve distributions (the normal and the exponential) with unknown location and scale parameters. It is shown that certain best affine invariant estimators are inadmissible. As an aid in obtaining one of these results, a representation, under fairly general conditions, of Bayes invariant procedures, in terms of Haar measure, is obtained. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 21, 1967
Accession Number
AD0660216

Entities

People

  • James Victor Zidek

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Estimators

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

  • Approximation Theory.
  • Statistical inference.