Sufficient statistics for exponential family form

probability distributionsstatistics

I'm a beginner with this topic. What I understand from what I have read is: there is a factorization theorem that specifies that a probability density function can be factored into a term that depends on $\vec{\theta}$ (vector of parameters) and on another that does not depend on $\vec{\theta}$. I also understood that there is a vector of sufficient statistics that fully describe our random phenomenon without the need to know $\vec{\theta}$.
Later I also read that there are instead certain distributions that belong to the exponential family, where these sufficient statistics do not depend on the sample size, for example, in the classical Gaussian distribution, the vector of sufficient statistics is reduced to: \begin{bmatrix} x \\ x^2 \\ \end{bmatrix}

My question is: since this vector depends only on x, is it enough for me to observe a single sample to know exactly everything about my random phenomenon?

Best Answer

For the classical Gaussian distribution, if you have a single observation then your sufficient statistics is $(x,x^2)$ but if you have multiple i.i.d. observations, then the sufficient statistics is $(\sum_{i=1}^n x_i, \sum_{i=1}^n x_i^2)$, and it very well depends on $n$.

You can say that the dimension of sufficient statistics is not increasing with $n$ but the sufficient statistics itself still depends on $n$.

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