 Likelihood-ratio test for an exponential support endpoint

Let $X_i=\theta +E_i$ for $n\ge 2$ independent and identically distributed observations, with $E_i$ having an exponential distribution of unknown scale $\beta >0$. Test the null hypothesis $\theta =0$ within $\theta \ge 0$. For nondegenerate data, the likelihood function isMaximizing over the scale gives $\hat{\beta }(\theta )=\overline{X}-\theta$, and the resulting profile likelihood increases with $\theta$. Thus the unrestricted maximum-likelihood estimates are $\hat{\theta }=X_{(1)}$ and $\hat{\beta }=\overline{X}-X_{(1)}$, while the null estimate is $\tilde{\beta }=\overline{X}$. The likelihood ratio is consequently

Under the null, put $A=n{X}_{(1)}$ and $D={\sum }_i(X_i-X_{(1)})$. The memoryless property gives independent gamma distributions of shapes $1$ and $n-1$ and common scale $\beta$. For a direct verification, fix which observation is the minimum and write its value as $z$ and the other observations as $z+e_j$. Their joint density is proportional to $e^{-nz/\beta }{\prod }_j{e}^{-e_j/\beta }$, which factors into an exponential density for the minimum and independent exponential densities for the excesses. The minimum's index does not affect the resulting laws of $A,D$.

By beta sampling by gamma ratios, $D/(A+D)\sim \mathrm{Beta}(n-1,1)$. ThereforeAn exact test size $\alpha$ is obtained by rejecting for $R\le {\alpha }^{n/(n-1)}$. Equivalently,Although the alternative adds one endpoint parameter, a regular one-parameter Wilks theorem calibration is incorrect: the support depends on the endpoint, and the null lies on its boundary. In particular, $-2\log R$ tends to a chi-squared distribution with two statistical degrees of freedom, not one.