The question is titled why is the likelihood function named as such when it does not appear to me to return likelihood? to which the only possible answer is the likelihood. There's nothing about the definition of likelihood that makes it an inverse of conditional probability as a concept. My question is, how do i determine the likelihood function?
I looked up the pdf of the exponential distribution, but it's different. So is the likelihood function always given to me in. I would like to know the underlying concept before going into mathematical derivation.
Could anyone explain to me in detail about maximum likelihood estimation (mle) in layman's terms? The wikipedia page claims that likelihood and probability are distinct concepts. The likelihood is a pdf, it's just normalised w.r.t all possible data outcomes, and the posterior is a pdf, but it's normalised w.r.t all possible parameter values even if the likelihood.