Design and performance evaluation in Kiefer-Weiss problems when sampling from discrete exponential families

Abstract

In this article, we deal with problems of testing hypotheses in the framework of sequential statistical analysis. The main concern is the optimal design and performance evaluation of sampling plans in the Kiefer-Weiss problems. For the case of observations following a discrete exponential family, we provide algorithms for optimal design in the modified Kiefer-Weiss problem and obtain formulas for evaluating their performance, calculating operating characteristic function, average sample number, and some related characteristics. These formulas cover, as a particular case, sequential probability ratio tests (SPRTs) and their truncated versions, as well as optimal finite-horizon sequential tests. On the basis of the developed algorithms we propose a method of construction of optimal tests and their performance evaluation for the original Kiefer-Weiss problem. All algorithms are implemented as functions in the R programming language and can be downloaded from https://github.com/tosinabase/Kiefer-Weiss, where the code for the binomial, Poisson, and negative binomial distributions is readily available. Finally, we make numerical comparisons of the Kiefer-Weiss solution with the SPRT and the fixed-sample-size test having the same levels of the error probabilities.