Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2019 / iii / Paper 350 / 1 / c / Solution

Use the Hellinger distance convention in the original PDF:The TeX transcription incorrectly places the integral outside the outer square root in the definition; the displayed formula for the squared distance and the original PDF both use the convention above. Although Lebesgue measure is not a probability measure, we may use it as the common dominating measure: the integral is unchanged by replacing it with any equivalent dominating probability measure.

For unit-variance normal distributions, put $\bar{\theta }=({\theta }_1+{\theta }_2)/2$ and $\Delta ={\theta }_1-{\theta }_2$. The product of the square roots of their probability density functions isThe final factor integrates to one, soFor the bound at arbitrary ${\sigma }_1,{\sigma }_2>0$, use the given formula for the Hellinger distance between normal distributions and writeSince $1-e^{-x}\le x$ for $x\ge 0$,Therefore one valid choice is $\boxed{C_{{\sigma }_1,{\sigma }_2}=1/({\sigma }_1^2+{\sigma }_2^2)}$. In particular this bound is uniform when the two standard deviations stay bounded away from zero.