Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Yang, Williams, Jonathan P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13012
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909740870664192
author Liu, Yang
Williams, Jonathan P.
author_facet Liu, Yang
Williams, Jonathan P.
contents The many-normal-means problem is a classic example that motivates the development of many important inferential procedures in the history of statistics. In this short note, we consider a further special case of the problem, which involves only two normally distributed data points with a constraint that the pair of means are not too far apart from one another. Starting with a regularized ML estimator, we construct a novel possibilistic IM for marginal inference on one of the two means. Not only does the new IM remain valid, it is also more efficient than the standard marginal inference ignoring the a priori information about the closeness of means, as well as the partial conditioning IM solution recently proposed in Yang et al. (2023).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_13012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Improved Solution to the Two Normal Means Problem via Regularization
Liu, Yang
Williams, Jonathan P.
Methodology
The many-normal-means problem is a classic example that motivates the development of many important inferential procedures in the history of statistics. In this short note, we consider a further special case of the problem, which involves only two normally distributed data points with a constraint that the pair of means are not too far apart from one another. Starting with a regularized ML estimator, we construct a novel possibilistic IM for marginal inference on one of the two means. Not only does the new IM remain valid, it is also more efficient than the standard marginal inference ignoring the a priori information about the closeness of means, as well as the partial conditioning IM solution recently proposed in Yang et al. (2023).
title An Improved Solution to the Two Normal Means Problem via Regularization
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13012