ABSTRACT
In this chapter we describe several ways in which population ecology data are collected. We present a variety of illustrative data sets, to which we shall return later in the book. For convenience, the data sets are mainly chosen to be small, but in practice of course real data sets can be extensive. Both classical and Bayesian methods take as their starting point the likelihood, and so we provide several examples of likelihood construction. In these examples the likelihood is the joint probability of the data. The classical method of forming maximum-likelihood estimates of model parameters proceeds by regarding the likelihood as a function of the model parameters alone, for fixed data, and then maximising the likelihood with respect to the parameters.
