Birth—death processes

Abstract

The birth–death process is a special case of continuous-time Markov process where the state transitions are of only two types: "births" which increase the state variable by one and "deaths" which decrease the state by one. The model's name comes from a common application, the use of such models to represent the current size of a population where the transitions are literal births and deaths. Birth–death processes have many applications in demography, queueing theory, performance engineering, epidemiology or in biology. They may be used, for example to study the evolution of bacteria, the number of people with a disease within a population, or the number of customers in line at the supermarket.