Congratulation to Chen Yu, who passed his viva with minor corrections on 27th May. Chen’s project, The Use of Mixture Models in Capture-Recapture, was supervised by Byron Morgan and Diana Cole.

Abstract
Mixture models have been widely used to model heterogeneity. In this thesis,
we focus on the use of mixture models in capture{recapture, for both closed
populations and open populations. We provide both practical and theoretical
investigations. A new model is proposed for closed populations and the practical
diculties of model tting for mixture models are demonstrated for open
populations. As the number of model parameters can increase with the number
of mixture components, whether we can estimate all of the parameters using
the method of maximum likelihood is an important issue. We explore this
using formal methods and develop general rules to ensure that all parameters
are estimable.