Abstract: | Consider a statistical model, given by the distribution of the observation X, conditional on the parameter θ, and the prior distribution of the parameter θ. Let Hx denote the function that maps the prior mean and the prior covariance matrix into the posterior mean and the posterior covariance matrix, when X = x is observed. We prove that if the conditional distribution of X belongs to an exponential family, then the function Hx characterizes the distribution of Xθ. |