Maximul Likelihood Definition

We want to maximise the likelihood of observing the data that we actually did observe.

Given a model that says how the data was generated, find the parameters that maximises the likelihood of observing that data.

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How to speed up csv import in R

If you're storing a lot of data in csv files, reading it to R with read.csv can be painfully slow. Using the fread function from the data.table library increase read speed by 100x, so definitely check it out.

library(data.table)
data <- fread('data.csv')

If you prefer to work with a data.frame, it's easy to tell fread to save it as such as well.

data <- fread('data.csv', data.table=FALSE)