The paper gives a brief review of the expectation-maximization algorithm
(Dempster 1977) in the comprehensible framework of discrete mathematics. In
Section 2, two prominent estimation methods, the relative-frequency estimation
and the maximum-likelihood estimation are presented. Section 3 is dedicated to
the expectation-maximization algorithm and a simpler variant, the generalized
expectation-maximization algorithm. In Section 4, two loaded dice are rolled. A
more interesting example is presented in Section 5: The estimation of
probabilistic context-free grammars.Comment: Presented at the 15th European Summer School in Logic, Language and
Information (ESSLLI 2003). Example 5 extended (and partially corrected