Closed-form solutions for parameter estimation in exponential families based on maximum a posteriori equations
Abstract
In this paper, we derive closed-form estimators for the parameters of certain
exponential family distributions through the maximum a posteriori (MAP)
equations. A Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to assess the performance of
the proposed estimators. The results show that, as expected, their accuracy
improves with increasing sample size, with both bias and mean squared error
approaching zero. Moreover, the proposed estimators exhibit performance
comparable to that of traditional MAP and maximum likelihood (ML) estimators. A
notable advantage of the proposed method lies in its computational simplicity,
as it eliminates the need for numerical optimization required by MAP and ML
estimation.