The MLE is then 4.3 Estimating D by leaving-one-out It would not be clear how to perform leavingone-out estimation on fractional counts, but here we have a distribution over realizations of the data, each with integral counts, and we can perform leaving-one-out estimation on each of these.
our goal is to find the D that maximizes the expected leaving-one-out loglikelihood, which is just the expected value of (3): where C is a constant not depending on D. We have made the assumption that the n r are independent.