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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Using Integrated Likelihoods to Deal With Nuisance Parameters

There are more possibilities open to you when using maximum likelihood estimation than you might think.

When we're conducting inference, it's often the case that our primary interest lies with a sub-set of the parameters. and the other parameters are essentially what we call "nuisance parameters". They're part of the data-generating process, but we're not that interested in learning about them.

We can't just ignore these other parameters - that would amount to mis-specifying the model we're working with. However, in the context of maximum likelihood estimation, there are several things that we can do to make life a little easier.