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Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) is a method in statistics that determines the values of parameters that maximize the likelihood of observing a given data set. In other words, the MLE method estimates the most probable value of the parameter(s) that generate the observed data. The symbol for Maximum Likelihood Estimation is typically denoted as $\hat{\theta}$, where $\theta$ represents the parameter of interest and the hat symbol above it denotes that it is an estimated value.