Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-statistics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2021/3/a/ii/solution

The prior mean, posterior mean, and maximum-likelihood estimate are
For , the last follows by maximizing . At or , use the usual binomial likelihood convention that admits the endpoints and as maximum-likelihood estimates; if the parameter domain is strictly , these are boundary suprema rather than attained maxima. The posterior mean remains interior in all cases.
Taking
gives
Since and , . Thus the posterior mean is a convex combination of the prior mean and observed binomial proportion, with larger prior weight when is large relative to .

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