Maximum likelihood estimation

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is one of the methods to find the coefficients of a model that minimizes the RSS in linear regression. MLE does this by maximizing the likelihood of observing the training data given a model.

Background

Consider objective function

$y=w_{0}x_{0}+w_{1}x_{1}+\ldots +w_{m}x_{m}+\epsilon =g(x)+\epsilon$

where $y=g(x)$ is the true relationship and Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \epsilon} is the residual error/noise

We assume that Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle x_0 = 1} , and Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle \epsilon \sim N(0, \sigma^2)}

Likelihood function

The likelihood function determines the likelihood of observing the data given the parameters of the model. A high likelihood indicates a good model.

Failed to parse (SVG (MathML can be enabled via browser plugin): Invalid response ("Math extension cannot connect to Restbase.") from server "https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/":): {\displaystyle L(w_i, \sigma^2|x,y) = \prod \frac{1}{ \sqrt{ 2 \pi \sigma^2}} exp \left( - \frac{(y_i - g(x_i))^2}{2 \sigma^2 } \right)}

For every data point, the likelihood is computed. The product of all likelihoods are taken.

The weights are then changed to fit it better, and the process repeats.