On a Versatile Stochastic Growth Model

Abstract

Growth phenomena are ubiquitous and pervasive not only in biology and the medical sciences, but also in economics, marketing and the computer and social sciences. We introduce a three-parameter version of the classic pure-birth process growth model when suitably instantiated, can be used to model growth phenomena in many seemingly unrelated application domains. We point out that the model is computationally attractive since it admits of conceptually simple, closed form solutions for the time-dependent probabilities.

Keywords

• Stochastic Growth Models
• Pure Birth Process
• Time-Dependent Probabilities
• Continuous Markov Chain