Machine Learning, Data Science, Statistics, Probability, Editors Pick.
expected value of the log of P(X,|Z,θ) where Z is filled in by conditioning the expectation on Z|X,θ*. The final intuition is that by finding the parameters θ that maximize Q(θ,θ*) we will be closer to a solution which would maximize the likelihood P(X,Z|θ). While non-trivial, the proof of this