Maximum likelihood estimation of interclass correlations

Abstract

The method of maximum likelihood is used to estimate a mother-child correlation, ρ MS, when there are a variable number of offspring per family. The technique is iterative and uses standard Newton-Raphson procedures to facilitate convergence. A comparison is made using Monte Carlo methods between the maximum likelihood estimator and other more traditional estimators of interclass correlations. It is shown that the maximum likelihood estimator is roughly equivalent in mean squared error to the pairwise estimator.