Recursive Estimation in Capture-Recapture Methods

Abstract

An important problem in statistical ecology is how to determine the size of an animal population. The best known technique is the capture-recapture technique. A random sample of individuals is captured, tagged in some way and released back into the population. After allowing time for the marked and unmarked individuals to mix sufficiently, a second random sample is taken and the marked ones are observed. Using measure change techniques, we estimate recursively conditional distributions of various quantities.

Keywords

• Capture Recapture, measure change, unnormalized conditional distributions, parameter estimation, Gaussian noise.