Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2006/ib/paper-1/7c/solution

For the independent normal distribution observations, the log likelihood is
Its derivative is and its second derivative is , so the unique maximum-likelihood estimate is
For the prior with , multiplying prior density by likelihood and completing the square gives
Thus normal-normal conjugacy gives the posterior distribution
For quadratic loss, the conditional expected loss of action is the posterior variance plus . Its unique minimizer is the posterior mean, so the Bayes estimator is
This weights the sample and prior means by their respective precisions.

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