An overview of capture-recapture models

Capture-recapture methods have been widely used in Biological Sciences to estimate population abundance and related demographic parameters (births, deaths, immigration, or emigration). More recently, these models have been used to estimate community dynamics parameters such as species richness, rates of extinction, colonization and turnover, and other metrics that require presence/absence data of species counts. In this presentation, we will use the latest application to illustrate some of the concepts and the underlying theory of capture-recapture models. In particular, we will review basic closed-population, open-population, and combination of closed and open population models. We will briefly mention about other applications of these models to Medical, Social and Computer Sciences.

Keywords: Capture-recapture experiments; multinomial and mixture distributions; non-parametric and maximum likelihood estimation; population size estimation.