Gauss' 1809 discussion of least squares, which can be viewed as the beginning of mathematical statistics, is reviewed. The general consensus seems to be that Gauss' arguments are at fault, but we show that his reasoning is in fact correct, given his self-imposed restrictions, and persuasive...

Gauss' 1809 discussion of least squares, which can be viewed as the beginning of mathematical statistics, is reviewed. The general consensus seems to be that Gauss' arguments are at fault, but we show that his reasoning is in fact correct, given his self-imposed restrictions, and persuasive...

Finding the “best-fitting” circle to describe a set of points in two dimensions is discussed in terms of maximum likelihood estimation. Several combinations of distributions are proposed to describe the stochastic nature of points in the plane, as the points are considered to have a common,...

The fact that a k-monotone density can be defined by means of a mixing distribution makes its estimation feasible within the framework of mixture models. It turns the problem naturally into estimating a mixing distribution, nonparametrically. This paper studies the least squares approach to...

It is well known that for continuous time models with a linear drift standard estimation methods yield biased estimators for the mean reversion parameter both in finite discrete samples and in large in-fill samples. In this paper, we obtain two expressions to approximate the bias of the least...

In this paper we will consider a linear regression model with the sequence of error terms following an autoregressive stationary process. The statistical properties of the maximum likelihood and least squares estimators of the regression parameters will be summarized. Then, it will be proved...