gests that the proposed MLE is a big improvement over the MF baseline for twoway associations, but the improvement becomes less and less noticeable with higher order associations.
this observation is not surprising, because the number of degrees of freedom, 2 m − (m + 1), increases exponentially with m. In order words, the margin constraints are most effective for small m, but the effectiveness decreases rapidly with m. smoothing becomes more and more important as m increases, as shown in Figure 24(b), partly because of the data sparsity in high order associations.