Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2009/ii/paper-1/28i/iii/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2009 ii Paper 1 28I iii Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-14
The Lehmann–Scheffé theorem states that an unbiased estimator which is a function of a complete sufficient statistic is the unique minimum-variance unbiased estimator; equivalently conditioning any unbiased estimator on such a statistic produces it.
Use the unbiased estimator . Given , the positive sample vector is uniform on the simplex : the joint exponential density is constant there, independently of . For the conditional probability is zero. For , translating the first coordinate by changes the simplex size from to ; its -dimensional volume ratio is . Thusincluding , when this is the indicator up to a null boundary. Conditional expectation preserves unbiasedness, and completeness from part (i) proves the displayed estimator is the unique minimum-variance unbiased estimator.
It does not attain the Cramér-Rao bound. Equality in that bound requires the centred unbiased estimator to be proportional to the score function, hence affine in at fixed . This estimator is zero on a positive-probability interval and positive elsewhere, so is not affine; the step function is not affine either.
For the last assertion, the remaining observations are independent of the first . Conditional on , the internal proportions of those first are independent of the remaining sum, soNow the tower property for the nested information givesConditioning first on both sums is essential; the sigma-fields generated by and alone are not nested.
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