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I am currently studying the simple birth process and am stuck in trying to understand the following example.

EXAMPLE: Setup

Consider a population in which each individual gives birth after an exponential time of parameter $\lambda$, all independently.

If $i$ individuals are present then the first birth will occur after an exponential time of parameter $i\lambda$.

Then we have $i + 1$ individuals and, by the memoryless property, the process begins afresh.

Hence the population performs a birth-death-process with $q_i = i\lambda$.

We denote with $X_t$ the number of individuals at time $t$ and suppose $X_0 = 1$.

Let $T$ be the time of the first birth.

EXAMPLE: Solution

We want to calculate $\mathbb{E}(X_t)$,

$$\begin{align*} \mathbb{E}(X_t) & = \mathbb{E}(X_t1_{T \leq t}) + \mathbb{E}(X_t1_{T > t}) \\ & = \int_0^t \lambda e^{-\lambda s}\mathbb{E}(X_t | T = s)ds + e^{-\lambda t} \end{align*}$$

Set $\mu(t) = \mathbb{E}(X_t)$, then $\mathbb{E}(X_t | T = s) = 2\mu(t-s)$

Setting $r = t - s$ we get, $$\begin{align*} e^{\lambda t }\mu(t) = 2\lambda \int_0^t e^{\lambda r} \mu(r) dr \end{align*}$$

By differentiating we get,

$$\begin{align*} \mu^{'}(t) = \lambda \mu(t) \end{align*}$$

and hence we conclude that,

$$\begin{align*} \mathbb{E} (X_t) = e^{\lambda t} \end{align*}$$

QUESTION

I don't understand the following point in the argument above,

Why can we immediately conclude that $\mathbb{E}(X_t | T = s) = 2\mu(t-s)$ ?

  • 1
    Because at time $s$, two individuals are born, which each yield in the mean $\mu(t-s)$ descendants $t-s$ units of time after their birth time, that is, at time $t$.2017-02-12
  • 0
    ok I see. Thank you so much.2017-02-12

0 Answers 0