1.II.27I

Principles of Statistics
Part II, 2008

An angler starts fishing at time 0. Fish bite in a Poisson Process of rate Λ\Lambda per hour, so that, if Λ=λ\Lambda=\lambda, the number NtN_{t} of fish he catches in the first tt hours has the Poisson distribution P(λt)\mathcal{P}(\lambda t), while TnT_{n}, the time in hours until his nnth bite, has the Gamma distribution Γ(n,λ)\Gamma(n, \lambda), with density function

p(tλ)=λn(n1)!tn1eλt(t>0).p(t \mid \lambda)=\frac{\lambda^{n}}{(n-1) !} t^{n-1} e^{-\lambda t} \quad(t>0) .

Bystander B1B_{1} plans to watch for 3 hours, and to record the number N3N_{3} of fish caught. Bystander B2B_{2} plans to observe until the 10 th bite, and to record T10T_{10}, the number of hours until this occurs.

For B1B_{1}, show that Λ~1:=N3/3\widetilde{\Lambda}_{1}:=N_{3} / 3 is an unbiased estimator of Λ\Lambda whose variance function achieves the Cramér-Rao lower bound

Find an unbiased estimator of Λ\Lambda for B2B_{2}, of the form Λ~2=k/T10\widetilde{\Lambda}_{2}=k / T_{10}. Does it achieve the Cramér-Rao lower bound? Is it minimum-variance-unbiased? Justify your answers.

In fact, the 10 th fish bites after exactly 3 hours. For each of B1B_{1} and B2B_{2}, write down the likelihood function for Λ\Lambda based their observations. What does the Likelihood Principle have to say about the inferences to be drawn by B1B_{1} and B2B_{2}, and why? Compute the estimates λ~1\tilde{\lambda}_{1} and λ~2\widetilde{\lambda}_{2} produced by applying Λ~1\widetilde{\Lambda}_{1} and Λ~2\widetilde{\Lambda}_{2} to the observed data. Does the method of minimum-variance-unbiased estimation respect the Likelihood Principle?