The Journal of Symbolic Computation published "The maximum likelihood degree of toric varieties," a paper co-authored by Assistant Professor of Mathematics Courtney Gibbons as a result of a Mathematics Research Community focused on algebraic statistics.
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a technique for finding coefficients for a model from observed data. When the model is a system of polynomials, the MLE problem leads to related problems in commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. This paper studies the projective variety described by the MLE equations for discrete exponential varieties.
