ABSTRACT
In this chapter we look at other stochastic processes including branching and epidemic models. Branching processes are concerned with the generational growth and decay of populations. The populations could be mutant genes, neutrons in a nuclear chain reaction, or birds or animals which have annual cycles of births. As the name implies a branching process creates a tree with branches which can split into other branches at each step or at each generation in a chain. In this chapter we shall look at a simplified problem in which the process starts from a single individual which generates the tree. Such a process models an application such as cellular growth rather than an animal population in which both births and deaths are taking place continuously in time.
