An example of an improvable Rao–Blackwell improvement, when using a minimal sufficient statistic that is not complete, was provided by Galili and Meilijson in 2016.[4] Let be a random sample from a scale-uniform distribution with unknown mean and known design parameter . In the search for "best" possible unbiased estimators for , it is natural to consider as an initial (crude) unbiased estimator for and then try to improve it. Since is not a function of , the minimal sufficient statistic for (where and ), it may be improved using the Rao–Blackwell theorem as follows:
However, the following unbiased estimator can be shown to have lower variance:
And in fact, it could be even further improved when using the following estimator:
The model is a scale model. Optimal equivariant estimators can then be derived for loss functions that are invariant.[5]