A Further Step Toward the Mother-of-All-Models: Flexibility and Functionality in the Modeling of Capture–Recapture Data

The idea behind the mother-of-all-models is to have the likelihoods for commonly used capture–recapture models factorized into conditional likelihoods that can be called and combined on request to give a user specified model. Barker and White (2004) mapped out a conceptual plan for the mother-of-all-models that included the robust design model and joint recapture, live re-sighting models. However they were unable to obtain a factorization that could easily include the multi-state model. Including any missing data directly into the model using data augmentation allows us to write the model in terms of the complete data likelihood (CDL). The CDL is a more natural representation of the model that factors into separate components that can be combined to give many different capture–recapture models, including the multi-state model. Overcoming the obstacles in the factorization brings the mother-of-all-models one step closer with the development of software the next step.

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