Figure 3

The ability of NIRS to predict the average age of a mosquito population. (I) The accuracy of mean population estimates for three An. gambiae s.l. populations of unknown ages when the true average life-expectancy is either 3 days (orange), 5 days (dark blue) or 7 days (red) (approximately 430 mosquitoes used in the training dataset). Dashed lines indicate the true value, whilst shaded area shows the 95% credible interval estimates (95% CI) as the number of mosquitoes sampled from the ‘unknown’ population increases. The data was generated by assuming NIRS errors are the same as those obtained in Study A (see methods). (II) The contribution of sampling variability and NIRS accuracy to the overall uncertainty. Shaded area indicates 95% CI caused by sampling variability (dashed line, light blue area) and the additional uncertainty caused by NIRS measurement error (dotted line, green area). Estimates were generated by randomly scanning 100 mosquitoes, with 300 mosquitoes used in the training set.