title: Estimating species richness by a Poisson-compound gamma model.
abstract: We propose a Poisson-compound gamma approach for species richness estimation. Based on the denseness and nesting properties of the gamma mixture, we fix the shape parameter of each gamma component at a unified value, and estimate the mixture using nonparametric maximum likelihood. A least-squares crossvalidation procedure is proposed for the choice of the common shape parameter. The performance of the resulting estimator of N is assessed using numerical studies and genomic data.
authors: Department of Statistics ,  Northwestern University ,  2006 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208 ,  U.S.A. jzwang@northwestern.edu.
authors: Ji-Ping
authors: JP
authors: Wang