The Admissibility of the Empirical Distribution Function

Abstract

Consider the problem of estimating an unknown distribution function $F$ from the class of all distribution functions given a random sample of size $n$ from $F$. It is proved that the empirical distribution function is admissible for the loss functions $L(F, \hat{F}) = \int (\hat{F}(t) - F(t))^2(F(t))^\alpha(1 - F(t))^b dW(t)$ for any $a < 1$ and $b < 1$ and finite measure $W$. Related results for simultaneous estimation of distribution functions and for finite population sampling are also given.