Topic summary
Log-likelihood function
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Likelihood function.
Log-likelihood
Log-likelihood function is the logarithm of the likelihood function, often denoted by a lowercase l or , to contrast with the uppercase L or for the likelihood. Because logarithms are strictly increasing functions, maximizing the likelihood is equivalent to maximizing the log-likelihood. But for practical purposes it is more convenient to work with the log-likelihood function in maximum likelihood estimation, in particular since most common probability distributions—notably the exponential family—are only logarithmically concave, and concavity of the objective function plays a key role in the maximization.
