write out the likelihood under the Joint Distribution then we can run the kind of optimization in this case can be done in closed form and we'll find that indeed we'll get the counts for conditional of State at time T given state at time t minus 1 and the counts for the condition of observation given state doesn't need to be count based distributions or discretize regions here is a continuous distribution exponential distribution and exponential is of the form lambda e to the negative lambda X X can only take