Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of a probability distribution by maximising a likelihood function, so that under the assumed statistical model the observed data is most probable
Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available
When making inference with missing data, any statistical method must rely on either explicit or implicit assumptions about the mechanism which lead some of the values to be missing
An Expectation–Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative method to find maximum likelihood or maximum a posteriori estimates of parameters in statistical models, where the model depends on unobserved latent variables
The most popular class of Bayesian iterative methods is called Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which comprises different algorithms for sampling from a probability distribution. The more steps that are included, the more closely the distribution of the sample matches the actual desired distribution