STATISTICAL-INFERENCE PROCEDURE FOR A HYPERGEOMETRIC MODEL FOR CAPTURE-RECAPTURE EXPERIMENTS

We use martingale theory and a method-of-moments technique to derive a class of estimators for a multihypergeometric model for a capture-recapture experiment. Certain choices of weight function lead to some standard estimators. Explicit expression for the estimators and their associated standard errors of the parameter, population size, is obtained. Optimal estimator among the class of estimators is derived which gives the tightest confidence interval for the population size; three examples are given. A simulation study is given to assess the performance of the proposed estimators with other existing ones.