A Non‐Parametric Estimation Method of the Population Size in Capture‐Recapture Experiments With Right Censored Data

We present a new non‐parametric approach for estimating the total number of animals or species when we only have information on the number of animals or species that have been observed once, twice, …$$ \dots $$, and the number of animals or species that have been observed r$$ r $$ and more than r$$ r $$ times. The approach, like the Chao estimator, gives a lower bound on population size while also providing bootstrap confidence intervals. We conducted simulations to compare our estimator to other competing ones in special scenarios with r=2$$ r=2 $$ and 3 and found that it performed quite well. In the case of uncensored samples, we analyze which censoring point is preferable in specific examples, as well as when censoring at r=3$$ r=3 $$ is superior to censoring at r=2$$ r=2 $$.