Maximum likelihood estimation is an established method in statistics that is used to infer unknown parameters of a probability distribution from data. Assume a probability distribution L(D | θ) that gives the likelihood for the realization of any potential measurement D under a specific choice of values for the distribution parameters θ. In maximum likelihood estimation, the values of θ are chosen to maximize the likelihood for the actually observed **data** D obs . This estimation technique is general and not bound to a specific choice of probability distribution.