OCR S4 2012 June — Question 7

Exam BoardOCR
ModuleS4 (Statistics 4)
Year2012
SessionJune
TopicContinuous Probability Distributions and Random Variables
TypePDF with multiple constants

7 The continuous random variable \(X\) has probability density function given by $$f ( x ) = \begin{cases} \frac { 1 } { 4 } ( 1 + a x ) & - 2 \leqslant x \leqslant 2
0 & \text { otherwise } \end{cases}$$ where \(a\) is a constant.
  1. Show that \(| a | \leqslant \frac { 1 } { 2 }\).
  2. Find \(\mathrm { E } ( X )\) in terms of \(a\).
  3. Construct an unbiased estimator \(T _ { 1 }\) of \(a\) based on one observation \(X _ { 1 }\) of \(X\).
  4. A second observation \(X _ { 2 }\) is taken. Show that \(T _ { 2 }\), where \(T _ { 2 } = \frac { 3 } { 8 } \left( X _ { 1 } + X _ { 2 } \right)\), is also an unbiased estimator of a.
  5. Given that \(\operatorname { Var } ( X ) = \sigma ^ { 2 }\), determine which of \(T _ { 1 }\) and \(T _ { 2 }\) is the better estimator.