Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2014/iii/paper-31/4/b/solution

Conditional on , summing the individual independent Poisson counts gives . The between-year conditional independence makes the likelihood function
Multiplying by the gamma distribution prior density, proportional to , gives the Poisson-gamma conjugacy with unequal exposures:
For an action , the posterior squared-error loss decomposes as
Hence the Bayes estimator under squared error loss is the posterior mean, giving
Future counts are independent of the observed years conditional on , so the law of total expectation then gives the posterior predictive expected count
The Bayesian and credibility estimates coincide exactly. This exact Bühlmann–Straub credibility for Poisson-gamma counts occurs because the posterior mean is already affine in the exposure-weighted experience, and therefore belongs to the class over which the credibility estimate minimizes mean squared error.

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