On the exact maximum likelihood inference of Fisher–Bingham distributions using an adjusted holonomic gradient method

Abstract

Holonomic function theory has been successfully implemented in a series of recent papers to efficiently calculate the normalizing constant and perform likelihood estimation for the Fisher–Bingham distributions. A key ingredient for establishing the standard holonomic gradient algorithms is the calculation of the Pfaffian equations. So far, these papers either calculate these symbolically or apply certain methods to simplify this process. Here we show the explicit form of the Pfaffian equations using the expressions from Laplace inversion methods. This improves on the implementation of the holonomic algorithms for these problems and enables their adjustments for the degenerate cases. As a result, an exact and more dimensionally efficient ODE is implemented for likelihood inference.