Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-statistics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2023/1/c/i/solution

Put and . Under the null hypothesis, maximizing over the nuisance mean gives . The unrestricted normal mean and variance maximum-likelihood estimators are , . Thus, for ,
The likelihood-ratio test statistic is consequently
The usual model assumes . The event has probability zero under a nondegenerate normal distribution; at that observation the unrestricted likelihood is unbounded as the variance tends to zero, and the ratio has limiting value zero. This is the likelihood-ratio test for a normal variance with unknown mean.

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