![The method of moments: A smart way to choose initial parameters for MLE Histogram of data overlaid with a beta density curve, fitted by maximum likelihood estimation](https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/files/2017/11/methodmoments0-640x336.png)
When you run an optimization, it is often not clear how to provide the optimization algorithm with an initial guess for the parameters. A good guess converges quickly to the optimal solution whereas a bad guess might diverge or require many iterations to converge. Many people use a default value