Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2006 iii Paper 44 2 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Assume the incubation times are independent observations from the same upper-truncated distribution. Conditional on lying below , the gamma distribution density is on its support. With , the likelihood function isIn particular, the normalizing factor cannot be omitted. On the admissible region the log-likelihood isThe profile likelihood eliminates the nuisance parameters by fitting them separately at each candidate endpoint:For fixed and ,Equivalently, for , every nuisance-parameter fit has . Taking suprema shows that is nonincreasing. If the nuisance maximum at is attained and finite, evaluating its maximizing parameters at shows strict decrease there as well. Values below the largest observation are inadmissible. Thus upper-endpoint estimation in a truncated distribution gives the usual boundary estimateThere is a support-convention qualification: the literal strict support excludes , so it gives a supremum approached as , rather than an attained maximum-likelihood estimator. Using the equivalent closed-endpoint density convention for a continuous distribution yields the usual boundary estimate above. The argument presumes a meaningful finite nuisance fit; degenerate samples can instead have an unbounded density likelihood. Since changes the support, regular interior-parameter asymptotic formulas are not automatically applicable.