The coupon collector urn model with unequal probabilities in ecology and evolution.

ABSTRACT: The sequential sampling of populations with unequal probabilities and with replacement in a closed population is a recurrent problem in ecology and evolution. Examples range from biodiversity sampling, epidemiology to the estimation of signal repertoire in animal communication. Many of these questions can be reformulated as urn problems, often as special cases of the coupon collector problem, most simply expressed as the number of coupons that must be collected to have a complete set. We aimed to apply the coupon collector model in a comprehensive manner to one example-hosts (balls) being searched (draws) and parasitized (ball colour change) by parasitic wasps-to evaluate the influence of differences in sampling probabilities between items on collection speed. Based on the model of a compl

SUBMITTER: Zoroa N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5332560 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature