 Solution

Use the residual mean squareTo justify its denominator, let $H=X(X^{T}X{)}^{-1}{X}^T$, the orthogonal projection matrix onto the column space of $X$. Then the residual is $(I-H)ϵ$. The idempotent matrix $I-H$ has rank $n-p$, so diagonalizing it with an orthogonal matrix givesConsequently $\mathbb{E}{s}^2={\sigma }^2$, making $s^2$ an unbiased estimator. If specifically asked for maximum likelihood estimation, maximizing over ${\sigma }^2$ gives the alternative ${\hat{\sigma }}_{\mathrm{ML}}^2=\Vert Y-X\hat{\theta }{\Vert }^2/n$, which is biased downward by the factor $(n-p)/n$.