Master of Science / Department of Statistics / Paul I. Nelson / Capture-Recaputre (CR) experiments stemmed from the study of wildlife and are widely
used in areas such as ecology, epidemiology, evaluation of census undercounts, and software
testing, to estimate population size, survival rate, and other population parameters. The
basic idea of the design is to use “overlapping” information contained in multiple samples
from the population. In this report, we focus on the simplest form of Capture-Recapture
experiments, namely, a two-sample Capture-Recapture design, which is conventionally called
the “Petersen Method.”
We study and compare the performance of three methods of constructing confidence
intervals for the population size based on a Capture-Recapture design, asymptotic normality
estimation, Chapman estimation, and “inverting a chi-square test” estimation, in terms of coverage
rate and mean interval width. Simulation studies are carried out and analyzed using R and
SAS. It turns out that the “inverting a chi-square test” estimation is better than the other two
methods. A possible solution to the “zero recapture” problem is put forward. We find that
if population size is at least a few thousand, two-sample CR estimation provides reasonable
estimates of the population size.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/13103 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Hua, Jianjun |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Report |
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