Lower bounds on the mean square error derived from mixture of linear and non-linear transformations of the unbiasness definition

International audienceIt is well known that in non-linear estimation problems the ML estimator exhibits a threshold effect, i.e. a rapid deterioration of estimation accuracy below a certain SNR or number of snapshots. This effect is caused by outliers and is not captured by standard tools such as the Cram´er-Rao bound (CRB). The search of the SNR threshold value can be achieved with the help of approximations of the Barankin bound (BB) proposed by many authors. These approximations result from a linear transformation (discrete or integral) of the uniform unbiasness constraint introduced by Barankin. Nevertheless, non-linear transformations can be used as well for some class of p.d.f. including the Gaussian case. The benefit is their combination with existing linear transformation to get tighter lower bounds improving the SNR threshold prediction

MSE lower bounds for deterministic parameter estimation

This paper presents a simple approach for deriving computable lower bounds on the MSE of deterministic parameter estimators with a clear interpretation of the bounds. We also address the issue of lower bounds tightness in comparison with the MSE of ML estimators and their ability to predict the SNR threshold region. Last, as many practical estimation problems must be regarded as joint detection-estimation problems, we remind that the estimation performance must be conditional on detection performance