Skills for Fitting Models to Data
Timothy E. Essington · 2021
Abstract The chapter “Skills for Fitting Models to Data” provides worked examples of the model parameter estimation and model-selection examples presented in Part 2, both in spreadsheets and in R. This chapter presumes that the reader is reasonably comfortable setting up spreadsheets and R code and applying the modeling skills presented in Chapter 15. It begins with maximum likelihood estimation, presenting first a direct method and then numerical methods that yield more precise (usually) estimates of maximum likelihood parameter estimates. It then examines how to estimate parameters that do not appear in probability functions (e.g. a model in which survivorship rate is density dependent). The chapter concludes by discussing likelihood profiles.