In this project, I wrote a function to develop a Monte-Carlo simulation of the capture-recapture method and investigated the statistical properties of the Lincoln-Peterson and Chapman estimators of population size, N(a population of size N = 5, 000 with n1,n2 = 100). I estimated the bias of the Lincoln-Peterson and Chapman estimators based on the results and evaluated the performance of both estimators in this simulation
Mark and recapture is a method commonly used in ecology to estimate an animal population's size where it is impractical to count every individual. In its simplest form, n1 individuals are “captured,” “tagged”, and released. A while later, n2 individuals are “captured” and the number of “tagged” individuals, m2, is counted.
If N is the true total population size, we can estimate it with NˆLP as follows: NˆLP = n1*n2 /m2. This is called the Lincoln-Peterson estimator.
