# Expectation Maximization Algorithm

## Introduction

The EM algorithm has been created to obtain the MLE in presence of missing data. Imagine that we are interested in estimate $\theta$ using the log-likelihood function $l(\theta; x, y)$; where the realizations $y$ are not available. In that case, the idea of the EM algorithm is to:

• Expectation step:Estimate the log-likelihood $l(\theta; x, y)$ by obtaining the expected value of the log-likelihood with respect to the conditional distribution of $Y$ given $x$ and for a fixed value of $\theta^*$.
• Maximization step: Maximize the estimated value of the log-likelihood with respect to $\theta$ to obtain a new $\theta^*$ for next iteration.
• Iterate until convergence.

It can be shown that the log-likelihood $l(\theta;x)$ is non-decreasing in each iteration of the EM algorithm. It worths mention that it is mainly used for maximizing the likelihood function when its expression is easiest to evaluate with an additional data $y$.

## Standard Errors

It is known that asymptotically the MLE $\hat{\theta}$ is normally distributed with mean $\theta_0$ and variance $I_E(\theta_0)^{-1}$, where $\theta_0$ represents the true value of $\theta$. Two alternatives can be used for the covariance matrix $I_E(\hat{\theta})^{-1}$, $I_O(\hat{\theta})^{-1}$ because $\theta_0$ is unknown. Then, in order to compute the standard error of the estimator, the inverse of the observed information is required.

For one parameter case, it can be shown that:

$-\frac{d^2}{d\theta^2} log f(x|\theta) = - \frac{\partial^2 Q(\theta, \phi)}{\partial\theta^2} - - \frac{\partial^2 H(\theta, \phi)}{\partial \theta^2}$ where $Q$ is just the estimated log-likelihood obtained from the expectation step and $H$ is the variance of the derivative of the logarithm of $f(x, Y, \theta)$ for fixed values $x$ and $\hat{\theta}$.

## References

• Computational Intensive Methods, Lancaster University