Population size estimation for capture-recapture models with applications to epidemiological data

The capture-recapture method is applied to estimate the population size of a target population based on ascertainment data in epidemiological applications. We generalize the three-list case of Chao & Tsay (1998) to situations where more than three lists are available. An estimation procedure is presented using the concept of sample coverage, which can be interpreted as a measure of overlap information among multiple list records. When there is enough overlap, an estimator of the total population size is proposed. The bootstrap method is used to construct a variance estimator and confidence interval. If the overlap rate is relatively low, then the population size cannot be precisely estimated and thus only a lower (upper) bound is proposed for positively (negatively) dependent lists. The proposed method is applied to two data sets, one with a high and one with a low overlap rate.