using the set of ranks rather than the numerical values. Another example occurs in linear mixed models, where considering a likelihood for the residuals only after fitting the fixed effects leads to residual maximum likelihood estimation of the variance components. Partial likelihood A partial likelihood is an adaption of the full likelihood such that only a part of the parameters (the parameters of interest) occur in it. It is a key component of the proportional hazards model: using a restriction on the hazard function, the likelihood does not contain the shape of the hazard over time. Products of likelihoods The likelihood, given two or more independent events, is the product of the likelihoods of each of the individual events: This follows from the definition of independence in probability: the probabilities of two independent events happening, given a model, is the product of the probabilities. This is particularly important when the events are from independent and identically distributed random variables, such as independent observations or sampling with replacement. In such a situation, the likelihood function factors into a product of individual likelihood functions. The empty product has value 1, which corresponds to the likelihood, given no event, being 1: before any data, the likelihood is always 1. This is similar to a uniform prior in Bayesian statistics, but in likelihoodist statistics this is not an improper prior because likelihoods are not integrated. Log-likelihood Log-likelihood function is a logarithmic transformation of the likelihood function, often denoted by a lowercase or , to contrast with the uppercase or for the likelihood. Because logarithms are strictly increasing functions, maximizing the likelihood is equivalent to maximizing the log-likelihood. But for practical purposes it is more convenient to work with the log-likelihood function in maximum likelihood estimation, in particular since most common probability distributions—notably the exponential family—are only logarithmically concave, and concavity of the objective function plays a key role in the maximization. Given the independence of each event, the overall log-likelihood of intersection equals the sum of the log-likelihoods of the individual events. This is analogous to the fact that the overall log-probability is the sum of the log-probability of the individual events. In addition to the mathematical convenience from this, the adding process of log-likelihood has an intuitive interpretation, as often expressed as "support" from the data. When the parameters are estimated using the log-likelihood for the maximum likelihood estimation, each data point is