Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Suppose we have a sample of N independent random variables X1, …, XN where Xi has the distribution F(X|θ, øi). θ is a k-dimensional ‘structural’ parameter (θ(1), …, θ(k)), and the øi are scalar or vector ‘incidental’ parameters in some given space. The Xi may be scalar or vector random variables which are either discrete in which case we write f(X|θ, øi) for the probability associated with a given point, or else continuous random variables with a probability density f(X|θ, øi). In either case we sup pose the support of the probability distribution to be fixed. We aim to estimate the true value of θ by maximum-likelihood methods.