reading classics (#9)

In today’s classics seminar, my student Bassoum Abou presented the 1981 paper written by Charles Stein for the Annals of Statistics, Estimating the mean of a normal distribution, recapitulating the advances he made on Stein estimators, minimaxity and his unbiased estimator of risk. Unfortunately; this student missed a lot about paper and did not introduce the necessary background…So I am unsure at how much the class got from this great paper… Here are his slides (watch out for typos!)

 Historically, this paper is important as this is one of the very few papers published by Charles Stein in a major statistics journal, the other publications being made in conference proceedings. It contains the derivation of the unbiased estimator of the loss, along with comparisons with posterior expected loss.