ABSTRACT

An estimator that the statisticians have in mind may sometimes be close to the quantity they want to estimate, and at other times quite far away. If statisticians are trying to estimate the best choice of stock to buy, the high-tech stocks would have been good choices prior to the year 2000, but not at all good at the beginning of the year 2001. The most widely used method of estimation is that of maximum likelihood. Satisticians first explain maximum likelihood in the discrete case. These mathematical limitations make it unfeasible to investigate the method of maximum likelihood, although they are absolutely necessary for developing models to cope with situations that have not been previously encountered. However, they will not prevent the satisticians from becoming familiar with the most commonly used estimators employed by scientists who need statistics for analyzing their data.