I'm using python's statsmodels package to do linear regressions. Among the output of R^2, p, etc there is also "log-likelihood". In the docs this is described as "The value of the likelihood function of the fitted model." I've taken a look at the source code and don't really understand what it's doing.
Reading more about likelihood functions, I still have very fuzzy ideas of what this 'log-likelihood' value might mean or be used for. So a few questions:
Isn't the value of likelihood function, in the case of linear regression, the same as the value of the parameter (beta in this case)? It seems that way according to the following derivation leading to equation 12: http://www.le.ac.uk/users/dsgp1/COURSES/MATHSTAT/13mlreg.pdf
What's the use of knowing the value of the likelihood function? Is it to compare with other regression models with the same response and a different predictor? How do practical statisticians and scientists use the log-likelihood value spit out by statsmodels?
Likelihood (and by extension log-likelihood) is one of the most important concepts in statistics. Its used for everything.
For your first point, likelihood is not the same as the value of the parameter. Likelihood is the likelihood of the entire model given a set of parameter estimates. It's calculated by taking a set of parameter estimates, calculating the probability density for each one, and then multiplying the probability densities for all the observations together (this follows from probability theory in that P(A and B) = P(A)P(B) if A and B are independent). In practice, what this means for linear regression and what that derivation shows, is that you take a set of parameter estimates (beta, sd), plug them into the normal pdf, and then calculate the density for each observation y at that set of parameter estimates. Then, multiply them all together. Typically, we choose to work with the log-likelihood because it's easier to calculate because instead of multiplying we can sum (log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b)), which is computationally faster. Also, we tend to minimize the negative log-likelihood (instead of maximizing the positive), because optimizers sometimes work better on minimization than maximization.
To answer your second point, log-likelihood is used for almost everything. It's the basic quantity that we use to find parameter estimates (Maximum Likelihood Estimates) for a huge suite of models. For simple linear regression, these estimates turn out to be the same as those for least squares, but for more complicated models least squares may not work. It's also used to calculate AIC, which can be used to compare models with the same response and different predictors (but penalizes on parameter numbers, because more parameters = better fit regardless).