I would appreciate any possible help for this question because I have no clue what to do! Thanks so much!
Consider a population made of a fixed number (N) of people. At time t=0 there is only one infected individual and N-1 susceptible people in the population. When you get infected, you remain in the infected state forever. In any short time interval that is h long, any given infected person will transmit the disease to any susceptible person with a probability of alpha * h + o(h) where o(h) is an error term and alpha is the individual infection rate. Let X(t) denote the number of infected individuals in the population at time t >= 0. So X(t) is a pure birth process on states 0, 1, ... N.
What are the birth parameters?
EDIT:
Some issues I am having are: 1) What exactly does the question mean by birth parameters? 2) How would I set up this problem in the form of a probability statement? 3) Any hints to help me out would be great!