ON THE LEAST INFORMATIVE DISTRIBUTIONS UNDER THE RESTRICTIONS OF SMOOTHNESS

The least informative distributions minimizing Fisher information for location are obtained in the classes of continuously differentiable and piece-wise continuously differentiable densities with the additional restrictions on their values at the median and mode of population in the point and interval forms. The structure of these optimal solutions depends both on the assumptions of smoothness and form of characterizing restrictions of the class of distributions: in the class of continuously differentiable densities, the least informative distributions are finite and have the cosine-type form, and, in the class of piece-wise continuously differentiable densities, the least informative densities have exponential-type tails, the Laplace density in particular. The dependence of optimal solutions on the assumptions of symmetry is also analyzed.