出版社:Dep. of Statistical Sciences "Paolo Fortunati", Università di Bologna
摘要:Estimating population abundance is of primary interest in wildlife population studies. Point transect sampling is a well established methodology for this purpose. The usual approach for estimating the density or the size of the population of interest is to assume a particular model for the detection function (the conditional probability of detecting an animal given that it is at a certain distance from the observer). Two popular models for this function are the half-normal model and the negative exponential model. However, it appears that the estimates are extremely sensitive to the shape of the detection function, particularly to the so-called shoulder condition, which ensures that an animal is nearly certain to be detected if it is at a small distance from the observer. The half-normal model satisfies this condition whereas the negative exponential does not. Testing whether such a hypothesis is consistent with the data at hand should be a primary concern. Given that the problem of testing the shoulder condition of a detection function is invariant under the group of scale transformations, in this paper we propose the uniformly most powerful.