Comparison of the performance of age-structured models with few survey indices

Abstract

Abstract Age-structured models have played an important role in fisheries stock assessment. Although virtual population analysis (VPA) was once the most widely used stock assessment model for when catch-at-age information is available, (hierarchical) statistical catch-at-age analysis (SCAA) is about to take that position. However, the estimation performance of different age-structured models has not been evaluated sufficiently, especially in cases where there are few available abundance indices. We examined the performance of VPA and SCAA using simulation data in which only the abundance indices of spawning stock biomass and recruitment were available. The simulation demonstrated that VPA with the ridge penalty selected by minimizing retrospective bias provided near-unbiased abundance estimates without catch-at-age error and moderately biased estimates with catch-at-age error, whereas SCAA with random-walk selectivity suffered from problems in estimating parameters and population states. Without sufficient information on abundance trends, naïvely using SCAA with many random effects should be done cautiously, and comparing results from various age-structured models via simulation tests will be informative in selecting an appropriate stock assessment model.