efficiency and the Fréchet-Darmois-Cramèr-Rao bound

 

Following some entries on X validated, and after grading a mathematical statistics exam involving Cramèr-Rao, or Fréchet-Darmois-Cramèr-Rao to include both French contributors pictured above, I wonder as usual at the relevance of a concept of efficiency outside [and even inside] the restricted case of unbiased estimators. The general (frequentist) version is that the variance of an estimator δ of [any transform of] θ with bias b(θ) is

I(θ)⁻¹ (1+b'(θ))²

while a Bayesian version is the van Trees inequality on the integrated squared error loss

(E(I(θ))+I(π))⁻¹

where I(θ) and I(π) are the Fisher information and the prior entropy, respectively. But this opens a whole can of worms, in my opinion since

• establishing that a given estimator is efficient requires computing both the bias and the variance of that estimator, not an easy task when considering a Bayes estimator or even the James-Stein estimator. I actually do not know if any of the estimators dominating the standard Normal mean estimator has been shown to be efficient (although there exist results for closed form expressions of the James-Stein estimator quadratic risk, including one of mine the Canadian Journal of Statistics published verbatim in 1988). Or is there a result that a Bayes estimator associated with the quadratic loss is by default efficient in either the first or second sense?
• while the initial Fréchet-Darmois-Cramèr-Rao bound is restricted to unbiased estimators (i.e., b(θ)≡0) and unable to produce efficient estimators in all settings but for the natural parameter in the setting of exponential families, moving to the general case means there exists one efficiency notion for every bias function b(θ), which makes the notion quite weak, while not necessarily producing efficient estimators anyway, the major impediment to taking this notion seriously;
• moving from the variance to the squared error loss is not more “natural” than using any [other] convex combination of variance and squared bias, creating a whole new class of optimalities (a grocery of cans of worms!);
• I never got into the van Trees inequality so cannot say much, except that the comparison between various priors is delicate since the integrated risks are against different parameter measures.