Getting Started

If you haven't read "Program MARK A Gentle Introduction" at http://www.phidot.org/software/mark/docs/book, then you should do this before going further. Evan Cooch at Cornell University is developing this electronic book. For the complete novice, this is the place to start to learn how to run MARK. This guide is a work in progress, so is not complete just yet.

For the more advanced user, notes are available at http://www.cnr.colostate.edu/class_info/fw663/Mark.html concerning the theory and use of MARK from the graduate course that David Anderson and Gary White formally taught at Colorado State University: FW663, Analysis of Vertebrate Populations, are available. This is the same material provided as "Technical Background" from Evan's site referenced in the preceding paragraph.

The first step to using Program Mark is to enter various inputs to describe the data. This is done with the File | New menu choice. You must have already determined the number of Encounter Occasions, number of Groups, number of Individual Covariates and the names you want to give each of them, the Data Type, Time Intervals between encounter occasions, and Group Names. These quantities are needed to determine the type of model to build. The Encounter Histories File contains the encounter histories, or raw data. This file has the .INP suffix, to indicate the file is an input file. After this input is provided, you click the OK button in the lower right corner of the initialization window to proceed. A results database will be created to hold the input data, and the model results you will eventually generate. Parameter Matrices are created, one for each parameter and group. These matrices default to Time matrices, which you can then modify to other possibilities. If you don't need any additional constraints, which can be specified via the Design Matrix, then choose the Run | Current Model menu option to produce the numerical estimates. The Run Window has additional requests for input, including the Run Title, Model Name, and which parameters to fix. When you click the OK button to compute the numerical estimates, you must wait for this process to complete before proceeding. At that time, you can store the output for this model in the Results Database (if you request it). Then, these results can be viewed from the Results Browser. You may exit the program, and later use the File | Open menu choices to open the Results Database to continue building additional models.