Maximum Likelihood Estimation of a Compound Poisson Process

Abstract

The problem of estimating the compounding distribution of a compound Poisson process from independent observations of the compound process has been analyzed by Tucker (1963). A maximum likelihood method is proposed. The existence, uniqueness and convergence of the resulting estimator are derived. One obtains practical solutions by means of a very simple algorithm which is briefly described. A numerical example is presented in the risk business framework.