Admissibility in Finite Problems

The Annals of Statistics · 1981 · Volume 9 · Issue 4

Abstract

Let $X$ be a random variable which takes on only finitely many values $x \in \chi$ with a finite family of possible distributions indexed by some parameter $\theta \in \Theta$. Let $\Pi = \{\pi_x(\cdot):x \in \chi\}$ be a family of possible distributions (termed "inverse probability distributions") on $\Theta$ depending on $x \in \chi$. A theorem is given to characterize the admissibility of a decision rule $\delta$ which minimizes the expected loss with respect to the distribution $\pi_x(\cdot)$ for each $x \in \chi$. The theorem is partially extended to the case when the sample space and the parameter space are not necessarily finite. Finally a notion of "admissible consistency" is introduced and a necessary and sufficient condition for admissible consistency is provided when the parameter space is finite, while the sample space is countable.

Keywords

62C15, 62F10, Admissibility, admissible consistency, Bayes rules, discrete uniform, expectation consistency, Inverse probability distributions, singular priors, squared error loss

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