Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-statistics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2014/3/c/solution
Past exam of the statistics course of the University of Oxford 2014 3 c Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
Use and as above. The future observation is independent of the old observations conditional on , so the posterior predictive probability is obtained by integrating its Poisson distribution against the posterior distribution of :The last integral is the normalizing gamma function integral, equal to . This is a negative binomial distribution in the count-of-failures convention with shape and success probability ; the gamma-function expression remains valid for noninteger . As checks, its mean is , and the law of total variance gives variance . The additional term is the contribution of posterior uncertainty in .
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