Friday, August 21, 2009
03:30 PM in BRNG 1268
Professor Bimal Roy
Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta

Counting Tigers thru pugmarks: a statistical approach

Abstract

The problem of estimating population total of animals from imperfectly characterizing animal signs poses a number of interesting statistical questions. A case in point is the estimation of tiger population from pugmark (foot print) measurements. We assume a random effects model for multivariate (features extracted from the pugmark) observations. The matrices representing "with-in tiger" & "between tiger" covariances are estimated and assuming these to be known, the number of tigers is estimated using maximum likelihood method.