Inadmissibility of invariant estimator of function of scale parameter of several exponential distributions

In various applied areas such as reliability engineering, molecular biology, finance, etc., the measure of uncertainty of a probability distribution plays an important role. In the present work, we consider the estimation of a function of the scale parameter, namely entropy of several exponential distributions with unknown and unequal location parameters with a common scale parameter under a general class of bowl-shaped location invariant loss functions. The inadmissibility of the minimum risk invariant estimator (MRIE) is proved by deriving a non-smooth improved estimator. Also, we have obtained a smooth estimator which improves upon the MRIE. As an application, we have obtained explicit expressions of improved estimators for two special loss functions: squared error loss and linex loss. It is further shown that these estimators can be derived for four important sampling schemes: (i) complete and i.i.d. sample, (ii) record values, (iii) type-II censoring, and (iv) progressive Type-II censoring. Finally, a simulation study was carried out to compare the risk performance of the proposed estimators.