secr (version 2.5.0)

confint.secr: Profile Likelihood Confidence Intervals

Description

Compute profile likelihood confidence intervals for `beta' or `real' parameters of a spatially explicit capture-recapture model,

Usage

## S3 method for class 'secr':
confint(object, parm, level = 0.95, newdata = NULL,
tracelevel = 1, tol = 0.0001, bounds = NULL, ...)

Arguments

object

secr model object

parm

numeric or character vector of parameters

level

confidence level (1 -- alpha)

newdata

optional dataframe of values at which to evaluate model

tracelevel

integer for level of detail in reporting (0,1,2)

tol

absolute tolerance (passed to uniroot)

bounds

numeric vector of outer starting values -- optional

...

other arguments (not used)

Value

• A matrix with one row for each parameter in parm, and columns giving the lower (lcl) and upper (ucl) 100*level

Details

If parm is numeric its elements are interpreted as the indices of `beta' parameters; character values are interpreted as `real' parameters. Different methods are used for beta parameters and real parameters. Limits for the $j$-th beta parameter are found by a numerical search for the value satisfying $-2(l_j(\beta_j) - l) = q$, where $l$ is the maximized log likelihood, $l_j(\beta_j)$ is the maximized profile log likelihood with $\beta_j$ fixed, and $q$ is the $100(1-\alpha)$ quantile of the $\chi^2$ distribution with one degree of freedom. Limits for real parameters use the method of Lagrange multipliers (Fletcher and Faddy 2007), except that limits for constant real parameters are backtransformed from the limits for the relevant beta parameter. If bounds is provided it should be a 2-vector or matrix of 2 columns and length(parm) rows.

References

Evans, M. A., Kim, H.-M. and O'Brien, T. E. (1996) An application of profile-likelihood based confidence interval to capture--recapture estimators. Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Experimental Statistics 1, 131--140. Fletcher, D. and Faddy, M. (2007) Confidence intervals for expected abundance of rare species. Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Experimental Statistics 12, 315--324. Venzon, D. J. and Moolgavkar, S. H. (1988) A method for computing profile-likelihood-based confidence intervals. Applied Statistics 37, 87--94.

Examples

## Limits for the constant real parameter "D"
confint(secrdemo.0, "D")