English

Bayes estimator for multinomial parameters and Bhattacharyya distances

Statistics Theory 2016-12-26 v1 Quantum Physics Statistics Theory

Abstract

We derive the Bayes estimator for the parameters of a multinomial distribution under two loss functions (1B1-B and 1B21-B^2) that are based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient B(p,q)=pkqkB(\vec{p},\vec{q}) = \sum{\sqrt{p_kq_k}}. We formulate a non-commutative generalization relevant to quantum probability theory as an open problem. As an example application, we use our solution to find minimax estimators for a binomial parameter under Bhattacharyya loss (1B21-B^2).

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.07946,
  title  = {Bayes estimator for multinomial parameters and Bhattacharyya distances},
  author = {Christopher Ferrie and Robin Blume-Kohout},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.07946},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Code available at https://gist.github.com/csferrie/d7a9dcbf10c5667348613dfe5980e543

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:33:16.441Z