EMPIRICAL BAYES ESTIMATION OF BINOMIAL PARAMETER WITH SYMMETRICAL PRIORS

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the binomial parameter via the nonparametric empirical Bayes approach. This estimation problem has the feature that estimators which are asymptotically optimal in the usual empirical Bayes sense do not exist (Robbins (1956, 1964)). However, as pointed out by Liang (1984) and Gupta and Liang (1986), it is possible to construct asymptotically optimal empirical Bayes estimators if the unknown prior is symmetric about the point 1/2. In this paper, assuming symmetric priors a monotone empirical Bayes estimator is constructed by using the isotonic regression method, This estimator is asymptotically optimal in the usual empirical Bayes sense. The corresponding rate of convergence is investigated and shown to be of order n-1, where n is the number of past observations at hand. © 1990, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.