Paper 4, Section II, J
Let be a probability density function, with cumulant generating function . Define what it means for a random variable to have a model function of exponential dispersion family form, generated by .
A random variable is said to have an inverse Gaussian distribution, with parameters and (both positive), if its density function is
Show that the family of all inverse Gaussian distributions for is of exponential dispersion family form. Deduce directly the corresponding expressions for and in terms of and . What are the corresponding canonical link function and variance function?
Consider a generalized linear model, , for independent variables , whose random component is defined by the inverse Gaussian distribution with link function thus , where is the vector of unknown regression coefficients and is the vector of known values of the explanatory variables for the observation. The vectors are linearly independent. Assuming that the dispersion parameter is known, obtain expressions for the score function and Fisher information matrix for . Explain how these can be used to compute the maximum likelihood estimate of .