Besides the huge miss that ships were fixed on every stop, I had also missed that merpeople were actually two different distributions. Without looking at my resulting model too much I would guess that this is the reason that my model didn’t account for around 700 of the crashed ships in the data.
With that in mind, I think my simplified model where I didn’t use the number of sunken ships (except through a log-normal prior on total number of encounters per encounter type) when estimating MLE for distribution parameters did fairly well.
Besides the huge miss that ships were fixed on every stop, I had also missed that merpeople were actually two different distributions. Without looking at my resulting model too much I would guess that this is the reason that my model didn’t account for around 700 of the crashed ships in the data.
With that in mind, I think my simplified model where I didn’t use the number of sunken ships (except through a log-normal prior on total number of encounters per encounter type) when estimating MLE for distribution parameters did fairly well.