World experts hosted by University

Monday, 18 July 2011

Delegates and speakers at the close of the meeting on recent advances in Capture-Recapture methods

World experts from the USA, Italy, and Holland visited the University recently. They came as guests of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Royal Statistical Society's Reading Local Group. The purpose of their visit was to give a workshop on the rapidly evolving statistical topic of Capture-Recapture methods.

Capture-Recapture methodology has been in use for over 100 years and was initially used in ecology and wildlife biology to estimate the size of animal populations where it is impossible to capture every member of that species.  

It is only recently that this methodology has found applications in other disciplines, such as criminology and epidemiology, where it has been used to estimate the size of drug-user populations and the prevalence of undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.

The keynote speaker was Prof John Bunge (Cornell University), who also presented a workshop preceding the meeting at the Statistical Services Centre on ‘Estimating population size with CatchAll' - a downloadable software package.

James Gallagher, Director, Statistical Services Centre said; "I am delighted with the success of this event which highlights the University's important contributions to this evolving statistical topic.   More generally, the Reading Local Group Committee would welcome suggestions for future meetings."

The meeting was attended by 30 delegates.  The event organisers, all committee members of the Royal Statistical Society's Reading Local Group, were Prof Dankmar Bohning (Mathematics and Statistics), Mr James Gallagher (Director, Statistical Services Centre) and Dr Fazil Baksh (Mathematics and Statistics).