Towards the mother-of-all-models: Customised construction of the mark-recapture likelihood function

Abstract

With a proliferation of mark-recapture models and studies collecting mark-recapture data, software and analysis methods are being continually revised. We consider the construction of the likelihood for a general model that incorporates all the features of the recently developed models: it is a multistate robust-design mark-recapture model that includes dead recoveries and resightings of marked animals and is parameterised in terms of state-specific recruitment, survival, movement, and capture probabilities, state-specific abundances, and state-specific recovery and resighting probabilities. The construction that we outline is based on a factorisation of the likelihood function with each factor corresponding to a different component of the data. Such a construction would allow the likelihood function for a mark-recapture analysis to be customized according to the components that are actually present in the dataset. © 2004 Museu de Ciències Naturals.