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Lecture

Likelihood Ratio Tests: Optimality and Applications

In course

MATH-442: Statistical theory

This course gives a mostly rigourous treatment of some statistical methods outside the context of standard likelihood theory. ...

Description

This lecture delves into the theory and applications of likelihood ratio tests, exploring their optimality properties and practical use in statistical hypothesis testing. The Neyman-Pearson paradigm is combined with maximum likelihood estimation to construct powerful tests. The concept of the likelihood ratio statistic is introduced, along with its role in comparing hypotheses. Examples illustrate the application of likelihood ratio tests in various scenarios, including testing for equality of means and exponential distributions. The lecture also covers the asymptotic distribution of the likelihood ratio statistic, as demonstrated by Wilks' Theorem.

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Instructor

Yoav Zemel

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Statistics

Statistical inference: Statistical hypothesis testing, Mathematical statistics

Related concepts (32)

Statistical hypothesis testing

A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters. While hypothesis testing was popularized early in the 20th century, early forms were used in the 1700s. The first use is credited to John Arbuthnot (1710), followed by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1770s), in analyzing the human sex ratio at birth; see .

Likelihood-ratio test

In statistics, the likelihood-ratio test assesses the goodness of fit of two competing statistical models, specifically one found by maximization over the entire parameter space and another found after imposing some constraint, based on the ratio of their likelihoods. If the constraint (i.e., the null hypothesis) is supported by the observed data, the two likelihoods should not differ by more than sampling error. Thus the likelihood-ratio test tests whether this ratio is significantly different from one, or equivalently whether its natural logarithm is significantly different from zero.

Likelihood function

In statistical inference, the likelihood function quantifies the plausibility of parameter values characterizing a statistical model in light of observed data. Its most typical usage is to compare possible parameter values (under a fixed set of observations and a particular model), where higher values of likelihood are preferred because they correspond to more probable parameter values.

Estimation theory

Estimation theory is a branch of statistics that deals with estimating the values of parameters based on measured empirical data that has a random component. The parameters describe an underlying physical setting in such a way that their value affects the distribution of the measured data. An estimator attempts to approximate the unknown parameters using the measurements.

Likelihood principle

In statistics, the likelihood principle is the proposition that, given a statistical model, all the evidence in a sample relevant to model parameters is contained in the likelihood function. A likelihood function arises from a probability density function considered as a function of its distributional parameterization argument.

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