Paper 1, Section I,
Part IB, 2011
Consider the experiment of tossing a coin times. Assume that the tosses are independent and the coin is biased, with unknown probability of heads and of tails. A total of heads is observed.
(i) What is the maximum likelihood estimator of ?
Now suppose that a Bayesian statistician has the prior distribution for .
(ii) What is the posterior distribution for ?
(iii) Assuming the loss function is , show that the statistician's point estimate for is given by
[The distribution has density for and