Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2017/prelims/mathematics-iii/8/a/i/solution

Treat the explanatory variables as fixed and put , . To identify both slopes, assume and . The given centring and orthogonality conditions make the three columns pairwise orthogonal.
The log-likelihood function in the normal linear model, up to a constant independent of the coefficients, is
Thus maximum likelihood estimation minimizes the residual sum of squares. Setting its partial derivatives to zero gives
Using decouples these equations:
The Hessian matrix of the residual sum of squares is , which is positive definite. These are therefore the unique minimizers. If either squared sum is zero, the associated explanatory variable vanishes identically and its coefficient cannot be identified.

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