Bayesian and frequentist methods differ in many aspects, but share some basic
optimality properties. In practice, there are situations in which one of the
methods is more preferred by some criteria. We consider the case of inference
about a set of multiple parameters, which can be divided into two disjoint
subsets. On one set, a frequentist method may be favored and on the other, the
Bayesian. This motivates a joint estimation procedure in which some of the
parameters are estimated Bayesian, and the rest by the maximum-likelihood
estimator in the same parametric model, and thus keep the strengths of both the
methods and avoid their weaknesses. Such a hybrid procedure gives us more
flexibility in achieving overall inference advantages. We study the consistency
and high-order asymptotic behavior of the proposed estimator, and illustrate
its application. Also, the results imply a new method for constructing
objective prior.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS649 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org