This book provides a self-contained introduction of Stein/shrinkage estimation for the mean vector of a multivariate normal distribution. The book begins with a brief discussion of basic notions and results from decision theory such as admissibility, minimaxity, and (generalized) Bayes estimation. It also presents Stein's unbiased risk estimator and the James-Stein estimator in the first chapter. In the following chapters, the authors consider estimation of the mean vector of a multivariat...

This book provides a coherent framework for understanding shrinkage estimation in statistics. The term refers to modifying a classical estimator by moving it closer to a target which could be known a priori or arise from a model. The goal is to construct estimators with improved statistical properties. The book focuses primarily on point and loss estimation of the mean vector of multivariate normal and spherically symmetric distributions.Chapter 1 reviews the statistical a...