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Density Prediction and the Stein Phenomenon

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Abstract

The Stein phenomenon is a path-breaking discovery in mathematical statistics in the last century. A large number of researchers followed Stein’s footsteps and developed a wide variety of minimax shrinkage point estimators of a multivariate normal mean vector, each dominating the sample mean. More recently, the problem resurfaced, but this time with minimax shrinkage predictive density estimation, illustrating once again the Stein phenomenon In this review paper, we discuss parallel developments for normal and Poisson distributions under the Kullback-Leibler and more general divergence losses.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the Associate Editor and referees for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions. Research of the second author was supported in part by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (18K11188 and 15H01943) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, University of Florida, 102 Griffin-Floyd Hall, Gainesville, FL, 32611, USA

    Malay Ghosh

  2. Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-0033, Japan

    Tatsuya Kubokawa

  3. Department of Statistics, University of Georgia, 310 Herty Drive, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    Gauri Sankar Datta

Authors
  1. Malay Ghosh
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  2. Tatsuya Kubokawa
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  3. Gauri Sankar Datta
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Correspondence to Malay Ghosh.

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Ghosh, M., Kubokawa, T. & Datta, G.S. Density Prediction and the Stein Phenomenon. Sankhya A 82, 330–352 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13171-019-00186-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13171-019-00186-z

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