David Blackwell
Kiarra Terry
Biography
Blackwell theorem
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In statistics the Rao–Blackwell theorem, sometimes referred to as the Rao–Blackwell–Kolmogorov theorem, is a result which characterizes the transformation of an arbitrarily crude estimator into an estimator that is optimal by the mean-squared error criterion or any of a variety of similar criteria.
The Rao–Blackwell theorem states that if g(X) is any kind of estimator of a parameter θ, then the conditional expectation of g(X) given T(X), where T is a suff., is typically a better estimator of θ, and is never worse. Sometimes one can very easily construct a very crude estimator g(X), and then evaluate that conditional expected value to get an estimator that is in various senses optimal.
The theorem is named after Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao and David Blackwell. The process of transforming an estimator using the Rao–Blackwell theorem is sometimes called Rao–Blackwellization. The transformed estimator is called the Rao–Blackwell estimator.