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ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/iii/paper-350/2/a/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2019 iii Paper 350 2 a Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
The conditional mean estimator is the posterior meanprovided the first moment is finite. A maximum a posteriori estimate is any maximizer of the posterior density relative to Lebesgue measure:Existence of the posterior density alone does not guarantee a finite posterior mean or existence of a maximizing point.
For the stated multivariate normal distribution and independent standard Gaussian noise, the negative log of the posterior density, up to a constant, isIts precision matrix is a positive-definite matrix, so Gaussian conjugacy for a normal linear model givesThe two forms agree becauseThe covariance matrix is , and the maximum a posteriori estimate equals the posterior mean for this multivariate normal distribution.
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