# Calculate the MLEs for betas of a logistic regression

An answer to a previous question on how to manually calculate the MLE for beta coefficients from a logistic regression was given the below answer (see previous question here: How to manually calculate the intercept and coefficient in logistic regression).

Take for example, the crosstab bellow shows how many males/females are in the honor class.

           |         female
hon |      male     female |     Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
0 |        74         77 |       151
1 |        17         32 |        49
-----------+----------------------+----------
Total |        91        109 |       200


As mentioned above $∑_iy_ix_{ij}=∑_ip_ix_{ij}$ holds. The left hand side(LHS) is the expectation of the observations (y's in samples) and the right hand side(RHS) is the model's expectation.

Assuming the function is $log(\frac{p1}{p1−p})=β_0+β_1x_i$ or equivalently $p=(\frac{1}{1+e^{β0+β1*x_i}})$ ($x_i$ represents the feature of the observation being a female, it is 1 if the observation is a female and 0 otherwise), obviously we know that the following two equations hold respectively when $X=1$ and when $X=0$ with the data shown above:

$\frac{32}{109}=(\frac{1}{1+e^{β0+β1*x_1}})$

$\frac{17}{91}=(\frac{1}{1+e^{β0+β1*x_0}})$

So the intercept $(β_0)$ is -1.47 and the coefficient $(β_1)$ is 0.593. You can manually get it.

I am confused as to how they jumped from $\frac{32}{109}$ to getting the estimate for $(β_1)$. This seems like a useful way to estimate MLEs of parameters in a logistic regression. Can anyone help explain how they got to $(β_1)$ is 0.593 ?

In this regression, then are only two observations and two fitted values, which are $\hat p_m=17/91$ for males and $\hat p_f=32/109$ for females.
Converting to the logit linear predictor scale gives: $$\mbox{logit}(\hat p_m)= \hat\beta_0=\log\frac{ 17}{91-17} = \log\frac{17}{74}=-1.471$$ and $$\mbox{logit}(\hat p_f)=\hat\beta_0+\hat\beta_1=\log\frac{32}{109-32} = \log\frac{32}{77}=-0.878$$ Hence $$\hat\beta_1= -0.878 + 1.471 = 0.593$$