ABSTRACT
Estimation of the size of an elusive target population is of great interest in several areas such as biology, ecology, epidemiology, public health and social science. Capture-recapture methods have been applied to estimate the size of populations which are difficult to approach. They have a long history and were traditionally applied in wildlife, biology and ecology to estimate the animal abundance and the size of wildlife populations. A counting distribution arises when a frequency table is constructed from summarizing how often a particular individual was identified. This is usually referred to as capture-recapture data in the form of frequencies of frequencies. However, some individuals do not appear since they have never been identified, so the zero count data are missing. The geometric distribution is a remarkably simple and flexible distribution. Although it has been often ignored for modeling count distributions, it is popular in survival analysis for lifetime data and also interesting for its memoryless property.
