My guess is that the OP was asking about the generalized log-likelihood ratio test used in the Mahout recommendation framework.
That is a bit different from what you describe in that it is the log of the ratio of two maximum likelihoods. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-test for a definition of the test used in Mahout. On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Jeremy Lewi <[email protected]> wrote: > Thomas, > > Are you asking a general question about log-likelihood or a specific > implementation usage in Mahout? > > In general the likelihood is just a number, between 0 and 1 which > measures the probability of observing some data under some distribution. > >
