Write . Ignoring only terms independent of , the Poisson log-likelihood is . The multinomial model is defined on the constraint , since its probabilities must sum to one. On this constraint its full log-likelihood satisfies
where both likelihoods include the same terms. Thus they differ by a constant on the admissible multinomial parameter set.
If the Poisson maximum-likelihood estimator has , it is feasible for the multinomial problem, and no feasible parameter can have a larger likelihood than it. Consequently it is also a multinomial maximum. With the usual uniqueness and identifiability assumption,
Without uniqueness, the precise conclusion is that is a multinomial maximizer; arbitrary independently chosen maximizers need not be identical. This qualification is necessary for a general unspecified parametrization.
In a log-linear generalized linear model with an unrestricted intercept, differentiation with respect to that intercept gives . Thus the fitted total automatically equals . One can fit independent Poisson cell counts using the usual GLM machinery and recover the multinomial fitted probabilities as . The result is constrained Poisson and multinomial likelihood equivalence, not an assertion that the sampling experiments themselves are identical.