The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound is widely used in statistical signal processing as a benchmark to evaluate unbiased estimators. However, for some random variables, the probability density function has no closed analytical form. Therefore, it is very hard or impossible to evaluate the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound directly. In these cases the characteristic function may still have a closed and even simple f...

BACKGROUND Patient-reported outcomes (PRO) that comprise all self-reported measures by the patient are important as endpoint in clinical trials and epidemiological studies. Models from the Item Response Theory (IRT) are increasingly used to analyze these particular outcomes that bring into play a latent variable as these outcomes cannot be directly observed. Preliminary developments have been p...

A fundamental issue in NMR spectroscopy is the estimation of parameters such as the Larmor frequencies of nuclei, J coupling constants, and relaxation rates. The Cramer-Rao lower bound provides a method to assess the best achievable accuracy of parameter estimates resulting from an unbiased estimation procedure. We show how the Cramer-Rao lower bound can be calculated for data obtained from mul...