Faster Asymptotic Solutions for N-Mixtures on Large Populations

M. R. P. Parker (), J. Cao, L. L. E. Cowen and L. T. Elliott
Additional contact information
M. R. P. Parker: Simon Fraser University
J. Cao: Simon Fraser University
L. L. E. Cowen: University of Victoria
L. T. Elliott: Simon Fraser University

Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, 2025, vol. 30, issue 3, No 7, 730-745

Abstract: Abstract We derive an asymptotic likelihood function for open-population N-mixture models and show that it has favorable computational complexity and accuracy when compared to the traditional likelihood function for large population sizes. We validate our asymptotic model with simulation studies and apply our model to estimate the population size of Ancient Murrelet chicks, comparing against results obtained using the traditional N-mixture likelihood and an alternative asymptotic model based on the multivariate normal distribution. For the Ancient Murrelet case study, our asymptotic model computes twice as fast as the traditional models, eleven times faster when parallel processing is used, and provides higher-precision estimates than the asymptotic multivariate normal model. We provide an open-source implementation of our methods in the quickNmix R package.Supplementary material to this paper is provided online.

Keywords: Asymptotic approximation; N-mixture models; Population abundance estimation; Synthliboramphus antiquus; Unmarked (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13253-024-00618-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jagbes:v:30:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s13253-024-00618-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/13253

DOI: 10.1007/s13253-024-00618-w

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics is currently edited by Stephen Buckland

More articles in Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics from Springer, The International Biometric Society, American Statistical Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().