Fitting the Geometric Distribution to Capture Frequency Data

Authors

H. Charles Romesburg, Utah State UniversityFollow
Kim Marshall, Utah State University

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title

The Journal of Wildlife Management

Publisher

Allen Press

Publication Date

1979

Volume

43

Issue

1

First Page

79

Last Page

84

Abstract

We computer simulated a mark-recapture experiment where the population size, N, is known and the recapture frequencies follow the geometric distribution. Two methods described by Edwards and Eberhardt (l967)-linear regression and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)--were used with these hypothetical data to give estimates of N. The results were (1) regression gives biased estimates while MLE gives unbiased estimates; (2) both methods produce inaccurate confidence intervals for N.

Comments

Originally published by Allen Press. Publisher's PDF and article fulltext available through remote link via JSTOR.

Recommended Citation

H. C. Romesburg and K. Marshall. 1979. Fitting the Geometric Distribution to Capture Frequency Data. Journal of Wildlife Management, 43(1):79-84.