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Turning one lonely observation into the sample mean

You have i.i.d. readings X1,,XnX_1, \dots, X_n from a Normal distribution with unknown mean μ\mu and known variance σ2\sigma^2. A lazy analyst estimates μ\mu using only the first reading, T=X1T = X_1. It is unbiased but wastes almost all the data.

Use the Rao-Blackwell construction to improve TT by conditioning on the sufficient statistic S=iXiS = \sum_i X_i, and show exactly how much the variance drops.

Your answer

This one is open-ended. Work it through, then check your reasoning against the full solution.

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