2008/04/07 by L. Cecconi, Lorenzo Cecconi, Alberto Gandolfi +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Environmental Science · Mathematics · #Animal Ecology and Behavior Studies #Applications (stat.AP) #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #Census and Population Estimation #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Probability (math.PR) #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) #Statistics Theory (math.ST) #math.PR #math.ST #q-bio.QM #stat.AP #stat.TH
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0804.1030
arxiv created 2008/04/07 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We consider the classic problem of estimating T, the total number of species in a population, from repeated counts in a simple random sample. We look first at the Chao-Lee estimator: we initially show that such estimator can be obtained by reconciling two estimators of the unobserved probability, and then develop a sequence of improvements culminating in a Dirichlet prior Bayesian reinterpretation of the estimation problem. By means of this, we obtain simultaneous estimates of T, of the normalized interspecies variance γ2 and of the parameter λ of the prior. Several simulations show that our estimation method is more flexible than several known methods we used as comparison; the only limitation, apparently shared by all other methods, seems to be that it cannot deal with the rare cases in which γ2 >1