OCR S4 2015 June — Question 8

Exam BoardOCR
ModuleS4 (Statistics 4)
Year2015
SessionJune
TopicDiscrete Random Variables
TypeVariance of estimators

8 The independent random variables \(X _ { 1 }\) and \(X _ { 2 }\) have the distributions \(\mathrm { B } \left( n _ { 1 } , \theta \right)\) and \(\mathrm { B } \left( n _ { 2 } , \theta \right)\) respectively. Two possible estimators for \(\theta\) are $$T _ { 1 } = \frac { 1 } { 2 } \left( \frac { X _ { 1 } } { n _ { 1 } } + \frac { X _ { 2 } } { n _ { 2 } } \right) \text { and } T _ { 2 } = \frac { X _ { 1 } + X _ { 2 } } { n _ { 1 } + n _ { 2 } } .$$
  1. Show that \(T _ { 1 }\) and \(T _ { 2 }\) are both unbiased estimators, and calculate their variances.
  2. Find \(\frac { \operatorname { Var } \left( T _ { 1 } \right) } { \operatorname { Var } \left( T _ { 2 } \right) }\). Given that \(n _ { 1 } \neq n _ { 2 }\), use the inequality \(\left( n _ { 1 } - n _ { 2 } \right) ^ { 2 } > 0\) to find which of \(T _ { 1 }\) and \(T _ { 2 }\) is the more efficient estimator.