Natural Exponential Families with Quadratic Variance Functions: Statistical Theory

Abstract

The normal, Poisson, gamma, binomial, negative binomial, and NEFGHS distributions are the six univariate natural exponential families (NEF) with quadratic variance functions (QVF). This sequel to Morris (1982) treats certain statistical topics that can be handled within this unified NEF-QVF formulation, including unbiased estimation, Bhattacharyya and Cramer-Rao lower bounds, conditional distributions and moments, quadratic regression, conjugate prior distributions, moments of conjugate priors and posterior distributions, empirical Bayes and $G_2$ minimax, marginal distributions and their moments, parametric empirical Bayes, and characterizations.