3.II.26I

Principles of Statistics
Part II, 2007

(i) In the context of decision theory, what is a Bayes rule with respect to a given loss function and prior? What is an extended Bayes rule?

Characterise the Bayes rule with respect to a given prior in terms of the posterior distribution for the parameter given the observation. When Θ=A=Rd\Theta=\mathcal{A}=\mathbb{R}^{d} for some dd, and the loss function is L(θ,a)=θa2L(\theta, a)=\|\theta-a\|^{2}, what is the Bayes rule?

(ii) Suppose that A=Θ=R\mathcal{A}=\Theta=\mathbb{R}, with loss function L(θ,a)=(θa)2L(\theta, a)=(\theta-a)^{2} and suppose further that under Pθ,XN(θ,1)P_{\theta}, X \sim N(\theta, 1).

Supposing that a N(0,τ1)N\left(0, \tau^{-1}\right) prior is taken over θ\theta, compute the Bayes risk of the decision rule dλ(X)=λXd_{\lambda}(X)=\lambda X. Find the posterior distribution of θ\theta given XX, and confirm that its mean is of the form dλ(X)d_{\lambda}(X) for some value of λ\lambda which you should identify. Hence show that the decision rule d1d_{1} is an extended Bayes rule.