In statistics, the method of support is a technique that is used to make inferences from datasets. According to

A. W. F. Edwards Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, FRS (born 1935) is a British statistician, geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He is the son of the surgeon Harold C. Edwards, and brother of medical geneticist John H. Edwards. He has sometimes been called ...

, the method of support aims to make inferences about unknown parameters in terms of the relative support, or log

likelihood The likelihood function (often simply called the likelihood) represents the probability of random variable realizations conditional on particular values of the statistical parameters. Thus, when evaluated on a given sample, the likelihood funct ...

, induced by a set of data for a particular parameter value. The technique may be used whether or not prior information is available. The

method of maximum likelihood In statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by maximizing a likelihood function so that, under the assumed statis ...

is part of the method of support, but note that the method of support also provides confidence regions that are defined in terms of their support. Notable proponents of the method of support include

Bibliography

*Edwards, A.W.F. 1972. ''Likelihood.'' Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (expanded edition, 1992, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore). Likelihood Maximum likelihood estimation {{stats-stub