Abstract
In a recent article Rehman et al. (Environ Ecol Stat 23:623–638, 2016) proposed a “novel, non-parametric, frequentist approach for capture–recapture data”. The supposed advantages of the method include the lack of parametric assumptions, the ability to include clustered samples, accounting for the order of observations, the efficiency of the asymptotic variance of the estimator and how large a sample is required for the estimator to be approximately unbiased (referred to as the rate of convergence in the article). We consider these claims, comparing the estimator of Rehman to that proposed by John Darroch in the 1950s. Rehman’s estimator is unable to improve upon Darroch’s either theoretically or practically.
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Notes
Our notation for \(\omega \) differs from that of Darroch (1958).
We have made minor changes to the notation of Rehman et al. (2016).
The original manuscript has \(Bern(y_{i}/\nu )\) which we believe to be in error. The change we have made has a follow on effect to the proposed estimator for \(\nu \).
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Handling Editor: Bryan F. J. Manly.
This comment refers to the article available at DOI 10.1007/s10651-016-0357-8.
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Schofield, M.R. Comment: Estimating abundance: a non parametric mark recapture approach for open and closed systems. Environ Ecol Stat 24, 587–594 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-017-0382-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10651-017-0382-2