Paper No. 09-20
C Mazzetta
Age-specificity in conditional ring-recovery models
Abstract: We consider the case of age-specific ring-recovery data obtained only from recovered individual birds and modelled by conditioning a multinomial distribution on the recovery. These models may be appealing when the information about the numbers of marked individuals is missing but they are often analysed by ignoring a large set of nuisance parameters, the recovery rates. We investigate what are the consequences of this type of conditioning by relating the age-time specific structure of recovery rates to the estimation of survival.
Keywords: Bayesian estimation; Conditional multinomial; MCMC; Ringrecovery; Survival rates.