Nonparametric Estimation of the Probability of Discovering a New Species.

Abstract

A random sample is taken from a population consisting of an unknown number of distinct species. A quantity of interest is the probability of discovering a new species when an additional draw from the population is made. An estimator of this quantity was introduced by Starr (1979). This document proves a conjecture of Starr's that the estimator is uniformly minimum variance unbiased and give various asymptotic properties of the estimator. A nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator is introduced which has similar asymptotic properties. A Monte-Carlo study is given which suggests guidelines for choosing an estimator under various circumstances. Keywords: U statistics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1986
Accession Number
ADA167493

Entities

People

  • Edward W. Frees
  • Murray K. Clayton

Organizations

  • University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bayesian Networks
  • Computational Science
  • Data Science
  • Estimators
  • Frequency
  • Information Science
  • Monte Carlo Method
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Sampling
  • Simulations
  • Statistical Samples
  • Statistics
  • Theorems
  • United States
  • Wisconsin

Fields of Study

  • Mathematics

Readers

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