A Complete Class Theorem for Statistical Problems with Finite Sample Spaces

Abstract

This paper contains a complete class theorem (Theorem 3.2) which applies to most statistical estimation problems having a finite sample space. This theorem also applies to many other statistical problems with finite sample spaces. The description of this complete class involves a stepwise algorithm. At each step of the process it is necessary to construct the Bayes procedures in a suitably modified version of the original problem. The complete class is a minimal complete class if the loss function is strictly convex. Some examples are given to illustrate the application of this complete class theorem. Among these is a new result concerning the estimation of the parameters of a multinomial distribution under a normalized quadratic loss function. (See Example 4.5).