Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-statistics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2014/3/b/iv/solution
Past exam of the statistics course of the University of Oxford 2014 3 b iv Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
No. A permitted counterexample is with all observed counts zero. Then and the posterior distribution is an exponential distribution with rate , whose density decreases strictly from the left boundary. Its equal-tailed credible interval isHere . This excludes values just above zero whose posterior density is larger than that of retained values near , violating the highest-density criterion. The actual highest posterior density interval starts at the support boundary and solves :Writing zero as the endpoint causes no problem because a single point has zero posterior probability. Thus even within the gamma family the two intervals need not agree. More generally, for an interior unimodal gamma distribution, highest-density endpoints have equal densities, whereas equal-tailed endpoints need not.
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