Research Projects
2. Capture-Recapture
Modelling with Life Science Applications
In recent years
capture-recapture methods have experienced important theoretical developments. New
application areas have been added to their spectrum, in turn supporting new
developments on the methodological side.
Capture-Recapture has
its origin in the Biological/Ecological Sciences with the work of Lincoln and
Petersen. One hundred years ago Petersen published his landmark paper
suggesting what later became known as the Lincoln-Petersen estimator, still in
use by numerous practitioners. In a way, this conference could be considered a
celebration of the centenary of the Lincoln-Petersen estimator.
Capture-Recapture
methods can be seen to be applied in three major sciences:
·
The biological
sciences, where the size of animal populations and their
diversity are of importance.
·
The life and medical
sciences, where we often want to know the size of the hidden
disease burden in a population, such as depression or drug use.
·
The social sciences, where we are interested in the amount of illegal activities, such as
illegal immigration.
The
research project focuses on various approaches which take into account that
capture probabilities experience heterogeneity. This includes the nonparametric
approaches by Chao and Zelterman, but also modeling
approaches that try to estimate population heterogeneity via mixture models.