Full Likelihood Inference for Abundance from Continuous Time Capture–Recapture Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Capture–recapture experiments are widely used cost-effective sampling techniques for estimating population sizes or abundances in biology, ecology, demography, epidemiology and reliability studies. For continuous time capture–recapture data, existing estimation methods are based on conditional likelihoods and an inverse weighting estimating equation. The corresponding Wald-type confidence intervals for the abundance may have severe undercoverage, and their lower limits can be below the number of individuals captured. We propose a full likelihood inference approach by combining a parametric or partial likelihood with the empirical likelihood. Under both parametric and semiparametric intensity models, we demonstrate that the maximum likelihood estimator attains the semiparametric efficiency lower bound and that the full likelihood ratio statistic for the abundance is asymptotically χ2 with 1 degree of freedom. Simulations indicate that compared with conditional-likelihood-based methods, the maximum full likelihood estimator has a smaller mean-square error, and the likelihood ratio confidence intervals often have remarkable gains in coverage probability. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed approach by analysing illegal immigrant data for the Netherlands and Prinia flaviventris data from Hong Kong.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.093 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".