Modeling participation duration, with application to the North American Breeding Bird Survey
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Abstract
We consider “participation histories,” binary sequences consisting of alternating finite sequences of 1s and 0s, ending with an infinite sequence of 0s. Our work is motivated by a study of observer tenure in the North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS). In our analysis, j indexes an observer’s years of service and Xj is an indicator of participation in the survey; 0s interspersed among 1s correspond to years when observers did not participate, but subsequently returned to service. Of interest is the observer’s duration D = max {j: Xj = 1}. Because observed records X = (X1, X2,..., Xn)1 are of finite length, all that we can directly infer about duration is that D ⩾ max {j ⩽n: Xj = 1}; model-based analysis is required for inference about D. We propose models in which lengths of 0s and 1s sequences have distributions determined by the index j at which they begin; 0s sequences are infinite with positive probability, an estimable parameter. We found that BBS observers’ lengths of service vary greatly, with 25.3% participating for only a single year, 49.5% serving for 4 or fewer years, and an average duration of 8.7 years, producing an average of 7.7 counts.
| Publication type | Article |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Title | Modeling participation duration, with application to the North American Breeding Bird Survey |
| Series title | Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods |
| DOI | 10.1080/03610926.2014.957854 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 21 |
| Year Published | 2014 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
| Publisher location | Philadelphia, PA |
| Contributing office(s) | Patuxent Wildlife Research Center |
| First page | 6311 |
| Last page | 6320 |
| Online Only (Y/N) | N |
| Additional Online Files (Y/N) | N |
| Google Analytic Metrics | Metrics page |