Maximum Likelihood

Maximum Likelihood

In statistics, maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of a statistical model. When applied to a data set and given a statistical model, maximum-likelihood estimation provides estimates for the model's parameters.

The method of maximum likelihood corresponds to many well-known estimation methods in statistics. For example, one may be interested in the heights of adult female giraffes, but be unable to measure the height of every single giraffe in a population due to cost or time constraints. Assuming that the heights are normally (Gaussian) distributed with some unknown mean and variance, the mean and variance can be estimated with MLE while only knowing the heights of some sample of the overall population. MLE would accomplish this by taking the mean and variance as parameters and finding particular parametric values that make the observed results the most probable (given the model).

In general, for a fixed set of data and underlying statistical model, the method of maximum likelihood selects values of the model parameters that produce a distribution that gives the observed data the greatest probability (i.e., parameters that maximize the likelihood function). In essence the method selects a set of model parameters that predicts that events that occur often in the data are very likely to occur, and events that occur seldom in the data are predicted to occur with small probability. Maximum-likelihood estimation gives a unified approach to estimation, which is well-defined in the case of the normal distribution and many other problems. However, in some complicated problems, difficulties do occur: in such problems, maximum-likelihood estimators are unsuitable or do not exist.