Title
Data-Discriminants of Likelihood Equations.
Abstract
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a fundamental computational problem in statistics. The problem is to maximize the likelihood function with respect to given data on a statistical model. An algebraic approach to this problem is to solve a very structured parameterized polynomial system called likelihood equations. For general choices of data, the number of complex solutions to the likelihood equations is finite and called the ML-degree of the model. The only solutions to the likelihood equations that are statistically meaningful are the real/positive solutions. However, the number of real/positive solutions is not characterized by the ML-degree. We use discriminants to classify data according to the number of real/positive solutions of the likelihood equations. We call these discriminants data-discriminants (DD). We develop a probabilistic algorithm for computing DDs. Experimental results show that, for the benchmarks we have tried, the probabilistic algorithm is more efficient than the standard elimination algorithm. Based on the computational results, we discuss the real root classification problem for the 3 by 3 symmetric matrix~model.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2755996.2756649
International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Maximum likelihood estimation, Likelihood equation, Data-Discriminant, Real root classification
Journal
abs/1501.00334
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.48
12
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jose Israel Rodriguez1176.01
xiaoxian tang271.63