TY - JOUR
T1 - Computing all roots of the likelihood equations of seemingly unrelated regressions
AU - Drton, Mathias
N1 - Funding Information:
The author was supported by the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund Grant No 65-3010.
PY - 2006/2
Y1 - 2006/2
N2 - Seemingly unrelated regressions are statistical regression models based on the Gaussian distribution. They are popular in econometrics but also arise in graphical modeling of multivariate dependencies. In maximum likelihood estimation, the parameters of the model are estimated by maximizing the likelihood function, which maps the parameters to the likelihood of observing the given data. By transforming this optimization problem into a polynomial optimization problem, it was recently shown that the likelihood function of a simple bivariate seemingly unrelated regressions model may have several stationary points. Thus local maxima may complicate maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we study several more complicated seemingly unrelated regression models, and show how all stationary points of the likelihood function can be computed using algebraic geometry.
AB - Seemingly unrelated regressions are statistical regression models based on the Gaussian distribution. They are popular in econometrics but also arise in graphical modeling of multivariate dependencies. In maximum likelihood estimation, the parameters of the model are estimated by maximizing the likelihood function, which maps the parameters to the likelihood of observing the given data. By transforming this optimization problem into a polynomial optimization problem, it was recently shown that the likelihood function of a simple bivariate seemingly unrelated regressions model may have several stationary points. Thus local maxima may complicate maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we study several more complicated seemingly unrelated regression models, and show how all stationary points of the likelihood function can be computed using algebraic geometry.
KW - Algebraic statistics
KW - Gröbner basis
KW - Maximum likelihood estimation
KW - Multivariate statistics
KW - Seemingly unrelated regressions
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=29744435720&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jsc.2005.04.005
DO - 10.1016/j.jsc.2005.04.005
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:29744435720
SN - 0747-7171
VL - 41
SP - 245
EP - 254
JO - Journal of Symbolic Computation
JF - Journal of Symbolic Computation
IS - 2
ER -