A mixture model is a flexible approach to cope with long-tailed, skewed, and/or contaminated count distribu- tions in a natural way. The mixing idea corresponds to a mixture representing the presence of sub-populations within an overall population. Formally, a mixture model can cope with not only two or more distributions (het- erogeneity) but also includes the case of one distribution (homogeneous population) [6-8]. Böhning and Schön [9] proposed the nonparametric maximum likelihood esti- mators (NPMLE) of population size based on the count- ing distribution. Böhning and Kuhnert [10] showed the equivalence of the zero-truncated count mixture distribu- tions and the mixture of zero-truncated count distribu- tions. They stated that for any mixing distribution of the truncated mixture, a usually different mixing distribution of the mixture of truncated counts could be found so that the likelihood surfaces for both models agreed; conse- quently, for estimating population size, two estimators associated with two models had equal values. Punya- charoensin and Viwatwongkasem [11] predicted HIV incidence in Thailand utilizing the backcalculation of mixture of the past AIDS incidence and AIDS incubation period distributions. Viwatwongkasem, Kuhnert, and Sa- titvipawee [5] compared the performance of population size estimators under the truncated count model with and without allowance for contaminations among Mc-Ken- drick’s, Mantel-Haenszel’s, Zelterman’s, Chao’s, the ma- ximum likelihood, and their proposed methods of the mixture of zero-truncated count models. The proposed estimator provided the best choice according to its small- est bias and smallest mean square error for a situation of sufficiently large population sizes and it also performed well even for a homogeneous situation.
Although, the mixture model has been used previously in many fields of application, it is still not very common; only few relevant studies were found in Thailand and, in addition, the numerical computation of mixture model estimates has not been directly provided in the existing standard statistical packages. With the motivation of having at present few relevant studies and unavailable statistical packages with the option or focus on estimat- ing the size of a hidden population, we take this opportu- nity to address the gap by adopting the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimators (NPMLE) for estimating the mixture parameters of zero-truncated Poisson distri- butions leading to the population size estimate of interest.