Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2019 / ib / Paper 2 / 8H (Statistics)

Let $S={\sum }_{i=1}^n{X}_i$ be the number of heads. The likelihood function for the Bernoulli distribution sample is proportional to ${\theta }^S(1-\theta {)}^{n-S}$. A uniform distribution prior on $[0,1]$ is the $\mathrm{Beta}(1,1)$ distribution, so Beta-binomial conjugacy gives the posterior distribution

The quadratic loss, also called squared-error loss, for reporting an action $a$ when the parameter is $\theta$ is

For any action $a$, decompose the posterior expected quadratic loss around the posterior mean:The unique minimizer is therefore the Bayes estimator under squared error loss. Using the mean of the posterior Beta distribution givesUnder repeated sampling at parameter value $\theta$, $S$ has the binomial distribution with expected value $n\theta$. Consequentlyso its bias of an estimator is $(1-2\theta )/(n+2)$.