Next: Lifetime Example for
Up: No Title
Previous: General Maximum Likelihood
- Physics texts give the example of determining the lifetime
of a particle from the observation of decay times
of N decays.
- The probability distribution is Poisson:

- Now dt is meaningless---it is independent of
and only affects
normalization of likelihood. The unknown
,
terms in (B1) made this arbitrary anyway!
- Likelihood
or
where we
lazily convert proportionality into an = sign. Maximum is

Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu