Likelihood is the hypothetical probability that an event that has already occurred would yield a specific outcome.

The
concept differs from that of a probability in that a probability refers to the occurrence of future events, while a
likelihood refers to past events with known outcomes.
A likelihood function
is the probability or probability density for the occurrence of a sample configuration
, ...,
given that the probability density
with parameter is known,

A quantity used to test nested hypotheses. Let

be a nested hypothesis with degrees of freedom within (which
has degrees of freedom), then calculate the maximum likelihood of a given outcome, first given
, then given .
Then

Comparison of
to the critical value of the chi-squared distribution with
gives the significance of the increase in likelihood.

degrees of freedom then

The term likelihood ratio is also used (especially in medicine) to test nonnested complementary hypotheses as
follows,

Maximum likelihood, also called the maximum likelihood method, is the procedure of finding the value of one or more
parameters for a given statistic which makes the known likelihood distribution a maximum. The maximum likelihood
estimate for a parameter

is denoted .

A maximum likelihood estimator is a value of the parameter

such that the likelihood function is a maximum