Class

Class "Population.Description" is an S4 class containing a description of the population. It provides methods to generate an example population.

Slots

N: Object of class "numeric"; number of individuals in the population (optional).
density: Object of class "Density"; describes the population density
region.name: Object of class "character"; name of the region in which the population exists.
strata.names: Character vector giving the strata names for the study region.
covariates: Named list with one named entry per individual level covariate. Cluster sizes can be defined here. Each list entry will either be a data.frame containing 2 columns, the first the level (level) and the second the probability
size: logical value indicating whether the population occurs in clusters. (prob). The cluster size entry in the list must be named 'size'.
gen.by.N: Object of class "logical"; If TRUE N is fixed otherwise it is generated from a Poisson distribution.

get.N: signature=(object = "Population.Description"): returns the value of N
generate.population: signature=(object = "Population.Description"): generates a single realisation of the population.