Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | This paper is concerned with a class of population growth processes in discrete time; the simple epidemic process is considered as a specific example. A Markov chain model is constructed and standard Markov methods are used to study the main biological concepts. A simple and explicit formula is obtained for the transient distribution of the population size. Then, the cost of the process is defined and the joint probability generating function of its components is derived. Finally, the results are extended to the case where the inter‐transition periods are bounded i.i.d. random variables. Copyright © 1988 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA |
