Support curve is a statistical term, coined by A. W. F. Edwards

A. W. F. Edwards

Anthony William Fairbank Edwards is a British statistician, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist, sometimes called Fisher's Edwards. He is a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and retired Professor of Biometry at the University of Cambridge, and holds both the ScD and LittD degrees. A...

, to describe the graph of the natural logarithm

Natural logarithm

The natural logarithm is the logarithm to the base e, where e is an irrational and transcendental constant approximately equal to 2.718281828...

 of the likelihood function

Likelihood function

In statistics, a likelihood function is a function of the parameters of a statistical model, defined as follows: the likelihood of a set of parameter values given some observed outcomes is equal to the probability of those observed outcomes given those parameter values...

. The function being plotted is used in the computation of the score

Score (statistics)

In statistics, the score, score function, efficient score or informant plays an important role in several aspects of inference...

 and Fisher information

Fisher information

In mathematical statistics and information theory, the Fisher information is the variance of the score. In Bayesian statistics, the asymptotic distribution of the posterior mode depends on the Fisher information and not on the prior...

, and the graph has a direct interpretation in the context of maximum likelihood estimation and likelihood-ratio test

Likelihood-ratio test

In statistics, a likelihood ratio test is a statistical test used to compare the fit of two models, one of which is a special case of the other . The test is based on the likelihood ratio, which expresses how many times more likely the data are under one model than the other...

s.

The term refers to the hypotheses

Statistical hypothesis testing

A statistical hypothesis test is a method of making decisions using data, whether from a controlled experiment or an observational study . In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance alone, according to a pre-determined threshold...

being tested, i.e. whether or not the data support one hypothesis (or parameter value) more than any other.