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, & mldr;, and the number of animals or species that have been observed r and more than 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 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 is superior to censoring at r=2.