Two-stage approaches to the analysis of occupancy data I: The homogeneous case

Abstract: Occupancy models are used in statistical ecology to estimate species dispersion. The two components of an occupancy model are the detection and occupancy probabilities, with the main interest being in the occupancy probabilities. We show that for the homogeneous occupancy model there is an orthogonal transformation of the parameters that gives a natural two-stage inference procedure based on a conditional likelihood. We then extend this to a partial likelihood that gives explicit estimators of the model parameters. By allowing the separate modelling of the detection and occupancy probabilities, the extension of the two-stage approach to more general models has the potential to simplify the computational routines used there.