Willis, Amy DPaynter, Alexander Caldwell2019-08-142019-08-142019-08-142019Paynter_washington_0250O_20282.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/44064Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2019Our goal is estimating the true number of classes in a population. We focus on the scenario where multiple frequency count tables have been collected from the same population. In this setting we demonstrate the efficacy of a previously published penalized maximum likelihood method. Four novel methods to tune the requisite penalization parameter are proposed. The performance of all proposed tuning methods is compared in simulations.application/pdfen-USCC BY-NC-SAabundancemicrobial ecologypenalizationspecies richnessBiostatisticsBiostatisticsThesis