censoring data

[bmarcek]

Hi, all.
This seems like a pretty simple question, but I haven't been able to find an answer. What is the best way to censor individual capture histories?

I am working on a multistate model with >1000 individuals, >100 occasions, and 8 states. Some individuals are harvested during this time and I'd like to censor the data following their last encounter. From what I've found, using a -1 in the ch is the appropriate way to do that.

For example, the same capture history for an individual harvested vs one that's not may look something like:

A000B00-1
A000B00

When I include -1 for some individuals and not others I get an error message when I try to use process.data().

Error in process.data(eh_2013_2022, model = "Multistrata") :
Capture history length is not constant. ch must be a character string
row numbers with incorrect ch length

I'm assuming this is a simple oversight on my part and I'm guessing the -1 should be in a separate column from the actual capture history but I haven't found much guidance on that so at the risk of looking a bit naive and uninformed, I'm posting here.

Thanks for any assistance.
Ben

[jhines]

The data frame for the process.data function uses (at least) 2 variables, one named "ch" and one named "freq". By default all values for freq are 1. You need to set freq to -1 for capture-histories which are censored. (eg.,

data$ch = c("A000B00","A000B00")
data$freq=c(-1,1)

[bmarcek]

Thanks. I figured it was something simple that I was overlooking.