Darryl Holman's Research

Darryl Holman's Research: mle

While quantitative modeling has been the norm in many fields, it has not been a widespread approach within biological anthropology. One reason for this is that the tools and the graduate training for these methods have not been widely available. One of the "side products" of my research over the last decade has been the development of a computer programming language for specifying and estimating likelihood models ( Holman 2003). The language, simply called mle (for maximum likelihood estimation), began as a series of numerical routines pieced together for the needs of the projects I was working on (e.g. Wood et al. 1992 , 1994 ; Holman et al. 1996 ), and has since become a full-scale programming language.

mle has become an extremely important tool for my research and has also played an important role in graduate student training. Since 1999, I have freely distributed the software and extensive documentation on the world wide web. Click here to go to the mle web site.

References cited

Holman DJ (1996) Total Fecundability and Fetal Loss in Rural Bangladesh. Doctoral Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Holman DJ (2003) mle: A programming language for building likelihood models. Version 2.1. Volume 1. User's Manual. and Volume 2, Reference Manual. http://faculty.washington.edu/~djholman/mle.

Wood JW, Holman DJ, Weiss KM, Buchanan AV and LeFor B (1992) Hazards models for human population biology. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 35:37-63.

Wood JW, Holman DJ, Yashin A, Peterson RJ, Weinstein M and Chang M-c (1994) A multistate model of fecundability and sterility. Demography 31(3):403-426.