find the maximum likelihood estimate what is it going to be well you have to do some math you'll have a bunch of y's and x's and this will be the probability of their combination and then you'll have to look at okay what maximizes the product of those probabilities you do a bunch of math what comes out well you see that effectively you get a least square solution that you have to do to find the parameters of this linear Gaussian and you will find that the variance is essentially the empirical variance left when estimating Y from X based on your