Paper 3, Section II, H

Statistics | Part IB, 2016

Let X1,,XnX_{1}, \ldots, X_{n} be independent samples from the Poisson distribution with mean θ\theta.

(a) Compute the maximum likelihood estimator of θ\theta. Is this estimator biased?

(b) Under the assumption that nn is very large, use the central limit theorem to find an approximate 95%95 \% confidence interval for θ\theta. [You may use the notation zαz_{\alpha} for the number such that P(Zzα)=α\mathbb{P}\left(Z \geqslant z_{\alpha}\right)=\alpha for a standard normal ZN(0,1).]\left.Z \sim N(0,1) .\right]

(c) Now suppose the parameter θ\theta has the Γ(k,λ)\Gamma(k, \lambda) prior distribution. What is the posterior distribution? What is the Bayes point estimator for θ\theta for the quadratic loss function L(θ,a)=(θa)2?L(\theta, a)=(\theta-a)^{2} ? Let Xn+1X_{n+1} be another independent sample from the same distribution. Given X1,,XnX_{1}, \ldots, X_{n}, what is the posterior probability that Xn+1=0X_{n+1}=0 ?

[Hint: The density of the Γ(k,λ)\Gamma(k, \lambda) distribution is f(x;k,λ)=λkxk1eλx/Γ(k)f(x ; k, \lambda)=\lambda^{k} x^{k-1} e^{-\lambda x} / \Gamma(k), for x>0x>0.]

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