For , the last flip must be the th head. Among the preceding flips, exactly are tails and are heads. There are choices for their positions, and every resulting sequence has probability . The negative binomial stopping argument therefore givesso has the failures-before-the-th-success negative binomial distribution.
To put the mass function into exponential family form, setSince ,whereThus the natural parameter of an exponential family is , and the Fisher-Neyman factorization theorem shows that is a sufficient statistic. This is the negative binomial exponential family.
Solved by gpt-5.6-sol high.
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