Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2014/iii/paper-35/1/e/solution

The posterior predictive probability averages the conditional probability over the Bayesian posterior. Using its gamma distribution density,
For fixed and ,
Consequently , and both tend to . This is reasonable because the posterior mean tends to the observed rate and the posterior variance tends to zero. Averaging then approaches evaluating it at the estimated rate: with abundant observations, predictive uncertainty about the rate vanishes.

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