Cartan meets Cram\'er-Rao
Abstract
A Cartan-geometric, jet bundle formulation of curvature-aware variance bounds in parametric statistical estimation is developed. Building on our earlier extrinsic Hilbert space approach to the Cram\'er-Rao and Bhattacharyya-type inequalities, we show that the curvature corrections induced by the square root embedding of a statistical model admit a canonical intrinsic interpretation via jet geometry and Cartan's prolongation theory. For a scalar-parameter family with square root map , we regard as a section of the statistical bundle and study its finite-order prolongations. We point out that the classical algebraic efficiency condition--that the estimator residual lies in the span of derivatives of up to order --is equivalent to the existence of a linear ordinary differential equation (ODE) of order satisfied by the square root map. Geometrically, this means the prolonged section lies in an ODE-defined submanifold of the jet bundle and is an integral curve of the restricted Cartan vector field. The obstruction to such finite-order integrability is identified with the vertical component of the canonical Ehresmann connection on the jet tower, which coincides with the curvature correction term in variance bounds. This establishes a direct correspondence between algebraic projection conditions in and intrinsic holonomy properties of statistical sections, yielding a unified geometric interpretation of higher-order information inequalities.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.15612,
title = {Cartan meets Cram\'er-Rao},
author = {Sunder Ram Krishnan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.15612},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
12 pages, updated version with results organised and added examples