Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2018 iii Paper 216 3 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-05
Write , , and . We keep the model's printed coefficient literally. Its latent log odds can be writtenThe independence of the is conditional on : they are not marginally independent when the random effects are correlated.
Holding the other predictors and the random-effect realization fixed, increasing predictor by one shifts the latent log odds by , so it multiplies the conditional odds of a late departure by . For a binary snow indicator, this compares the snow and no-snow days with other predictors held fixed. This is a conditional odds ratio, not generally the same as a marginal odds ratio after integrating the random effects.
Randomizing allows unmeasured daily conditions to change the success probability beyond the systematic linear predictor. In this logistic-normal regression with autoregressive random effects, let and . The law of total variance givesso the mixture allows overdispersion beyond a binomial distribution with fixed probability. The correlated part also allows related outcomes on nearby days.
The stationary autoregressive process of order one has and . HenceThe term is unstructured daily variability, whereas is the temporally correlated component under the printed parameterization. Larger gives greater persistence: the lag- correlation of the latent log odds is .
The PDF itself prints both the coefficient and the requested combination . They are inconsistent as a marginal variance. If the intended coefficient were , the variance and off-diagonal covariance would instead be and . The prior's argument list also repeats ; its displayed density indicates the intended second variance parameter is .
There is a further substantive issue with that improper prior. After integrating the latent variables, the observed-data likelihood function is positive and continuous at for fixed finite , positive , and . On a compact positive-volume set of those parameters it therefore has a positive lower bound for small . The prior density is , so integrating over gives . Thus the stated joint posterior distribution is improper, an instance of improper posterior from a log-uniform random-effect scale prior. The requested fixed-parameter conditional laws below are nevertheless proper; their existence does not remedy the joint impropriety.