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Maximum likelihood mapmaking is a method of creation of maps covering a region of the sky from data contaminated by noisy signal. The technique is used in processing data to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB), e.g., that has multiple observations of each "pixel" of a region of the sky, each observation maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to determine the presumed value of each pixel. To make the problem tractable, less-resource-intensive methods are commonly used that approximate the likelihood or otherwise approximate the results of the ML mapmaking technique.