Limiting the Risk of Bayes and Empirical Bayes Estimators—Part II: The Empirical Bayes Case

Abstract We discuss compromises between Stein's estimator and the MLE which limit the risk to individual components of the estimation problem while sacrificing only a small fraction of the savings in total squared error loss given by Stein's rule. The compromise estimators “limit translation” away from the MLE. The calculations are pursued in an empirical Bayesian manner by considering their performance against an entire family of prior distributions on the unknown parameters.