Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / ib / Paper 1 / 7H (Statistics)

The Rao-Blackwell theorem applies to an estimator $Y$ with finite second moment and a sufficient statistic $T$. The conditional estimator $Y^{\ast }={\mathbb{E}}_{\theta }[Y\mid T]$ can be chosen as a function of the observed $T$ that does not depend on the unknown parameter: this uses the parameter-independent conditional data distribution in the definition of sufficient statistic. The tower property of conditional expectation gives ${\mathbb{E}}_{\theta }{Y}^{\ast }={\mathbb{E}}_{\theta }Y$, so their bias agrees. The law of total variance givesFor any target $a(\theta )$ it follows thatEquality holds exactly when $Y=Y^{\ast }$ almost surely under that parameter value. This proves variance reduction and reduction of mean squared error, whether or not the original estimator is an unbiased estimator. More generally, conditional Jensen inequality proves the corresponding inequality for any convex loss in the estimate, whenever the expectations exist.

Since $\mathbb{P}(X_1=0)=e^{-\lambda }$, the indicator $Y$ is an unbiased estimator of $\theta$. The joint probability mass function isThe Fisher-Neyman factorization theorem therefore makes $T={\sum }_i{X}_i$ a sufficient statistic. More explicitly, conditioning on $T=t$ gives a multinomial distribution with $t$ trials and cell probabilities $1/n$, so $X_1\mid T=t$ has the binomial distribution $\mathrm{Bin}(t,1/n)$. Consequently conditioning by the Rao-Blackwell theorem givesFor $n=1$, interpret the value at $T=0$ as $1$ and at $T>0$ as $0$; thus the same expression uses $0^0=1$ in this probability convention. For $\lambda =0$ all observations and $T$ are zero almost surely. For $n>1$ and $\lambda >0$, the reduction in variance is strict: given $T=1$, the event $X_1=0$ still has a nondegenerate conditional probability. Directly, using the probability generating function of $T\sim \mathrm{Poisson}(n\lambda )$, the new variance is $e^{-2\lambda }(e^{\lambda /n}-1)$.