Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com

maximum likelihood

British  

noun

  1. the probability of randomly drawing a given sample from a population maximized over the possible values of the population parameters

  2. the non-Bayesian rule that, given an experimental observation, one should utilize as point estimates of parameters of a distribution those values which give the highest conditional probability to that observation, irrespective of the prior probability assigned to the parameters

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

Secker, J. & Harris, W. E. A maximum likelihood analysis of globular cluster luminosity distributions in the Virgo ellipticals.

From Nature Mar. 11, 2018

We then used the method of maximum likelihood to estimate the age distributions.

From Nature Nov. 14, 2017

Using the maximum likelihood algorithm of JoinMap, the order of the markers was determined; using this as start order and fixed order, regression mapping in JoinMap was used to determine the cM distances.

From Nature Feb. 7, 2017

Phylogenetic analysis of each data set was conducted using Bayesian inference in MrBayes and maximum likelihood in RAxML; input alignments are provided in Supplementary Data 8.

From Nature Dec. 25, 2016

A simultaneous unbinned extended maximum likelihood fit is performed to the data of the two experiments, using the invariant-mass distributions of all 20 MVA discriminant categories of both experiments.

From Nature May 12, 2015

Vocabulary.com logo
by dictionary.com

Join 12,000,000 vocabulary learners

Start learning new words today on VocabTrainer.
You'll remember them forever.

Start training