Gauss-Markov theorem

A Gauss-Markov linear model is a linear statistical model that satisfies all the conditions of a general linear model except the normality of the error terms. Formally, if $\boldsymbol{Y}$ is an $m$ -dimensional response variable vector, and $\boldsymbol{Z_{i}}=z_{i}(\boldsymbol{X})$ , $i=1,\ldots,k$ are the $m$ -dimensional functions of the explanatory variable vector $\boldsymbol{X}$ , a Gauss-Markov linear model has the form:

$\boldsymbol{Y}=\beta_{0}\boldsymbol{Z_{0}}+\cdots+\beta_{k}\boldsymbol{Z_{k}}+% \boldsymbol{\epsilon},$

with $\boldsymbol{\epsilon}$ the error vector such that

1.

$\operatorname{E}[\boldsymbol{\epsilon}]=\boldsymbol{0}$ , and
2.

$\operatorname{Var}[\boldsymbol{\epsilon}]=\sigma^{2}\boldsymbol{I}$ .

In other words, the observed responses $Y_{i}$ , $i=1,\ldots,m$ are not assumed to be normally distributed, are not correlated with one another, and have a common variance $\operatorname{Var}[Y_{i}]=\sigma^{2}$ .

Gauss-Markov Theorem. Suppose the response variable $\boldsymbol{Y}=(Y_{1},\ldots,Y_{m})$ and the explanatory variables $\boldsymbol{X}$ satisfy a Gauss-Markov linear model as described above. Consider any linear combination of the responses

$\displaystyle Y=\sum_{i=1}^{m}c_{i}Y_{i},$

(1)

where $c_{i}\in\mathbb{R}$ . If each $\mu_{i}$ is an estimator for response $Y_{i}$ , parameter $\theta$ of the form

$\displaystyle\theta=\sum_{i=1}^{m}c_{i}\mu_{i},$

(2)

can be used as an estimator for $Y$ . Then, among all unbiased estimators for $Y$ having form (2), the ordinary least square estimator (OLS)

$\displaystyle\hat{\theta}=\sum_{i=1}^{m}c_{i}\hat{\mu_{i}},$

(3)

yields the smallest variance. In other words, the OLS estimator is the uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator.

Remark. $\hat{\theta}$ in equation (3) above is more popularly known as the BLUE, or the best linear unbiased estimator for a linear combination of the responses in a Gauss-Markov linear model.

Title	Gauss-Markov theorem
Canonical name	GaussMarkovTheorem
Date of creation	2013-03-22 15:02:53
Last modified on	2013-03-22 15:02:53
Owner	CWoo (3771)
Last modified by	CWoo (3771)
Numerical id	8
Author	CWoo (3771)
Entry type	Theorem
Classification	msc 62J05
Synonym	BLUE
Related topic	LinearLeastSquaresFit
Defines	Gauss-Markov linear model
Defines	best linear unbiased estimator