Six parameters for the census model in a single year and their hyper-parameters across years.

The six main parameters are subscripted since there is one for every year i; each colony has a separate set. The population size had no hyper-parameters, meaning every year’s population was independent, and the two parameters describing tenure had hyper-parameters fixed in advance as narrow priors (μd = 31.06, σd = 0.27, μv = 0.1212, σv = 0.0062), a requirement for fitting the model [4]. The remaining parameters had Gaussian hyper-distributions estimated from the data. In a model covering Y years of censuses, 6Y + 10 parameters are needed: 6Y main parameters (6 per year) plus 10 hyper-parameters.