Estimation of a Loss Function for Spherically Symmetric Distributions in the General Linear Model

Abstract

This paper is concerned with estimating the loss of a point estimator when sampling from a spherically symmetric distribution. We examine the canonical setting of a general linear model where the dimension of the parameter space is greater than 4 and less than the dimension of the sampling space. We consider two location estimators--the least squares estimator and a shrinkage estimator--and we compare their unbiased loss estimator with an improved loss estimator. The domination results are valid for a large class of spherically symmetric distributions and, in so far as the sampling distribution does not need to be precisely specified, the estimates have desirable robustness properties.