Related papers: Deciphering infant mortality. Part 1: empirical ev…
Many spatio-temporal data record the time of birth and death of individuals, along with their spatial trajectories during their lifetime, whether through continuous-time observations or discrete-time observations. Natural applications…
Most studies on inequality in infant and child mortality compare average mortality rates between large groups of births, for example, comparing births from different countries, income groups, ethnicities, or different times. These studies…
We examine birth--death processes with state dependent transition probabilities and at least one absorbing boundary. In evolution, this describes selection acting on two different types in a finite population where reproductive events occur…
The wealth of nations and the health of populations are intimately strongly associated, yet the extent to which economic prosperity (GDP per capita) causes improved health remains disputed. The purpose of this article is to analyze the…
Abrupt shifts in ecosystems, brains, markets, and climate are often diagnosed as signs of approaching a tipping point, i.e. a critical bifurcation where stability is lost. Here we reveal a broader and more deceptive mechanism:…
We study an analytically tractable model with long-range interactions for which an out-of-equilibrium very long-lived coherent structure spontaneously appears. The dynamics of this model is indeed very peculiar: a bicluster forms at low…
Comprehensive models of stochastic, clonally reproducing populations are defined in terms of general branching processes, allowing birth during maternal life, as for higher organisms, or by splitting, as in cell division. The populations…
Mortality forecasting methods in the Lee-Carter tradition extrapolate temporal components via time-series models, often producing forecasts that systematically underpredict life expectancy at long horizons. This bias is consequential for…
Rare events such as conformational changes in biomolecules, phase transitions, and chemical reactions are central to the behavior of many physical systems, yet they are extremely difficult to study computationally because unbiased…
In this paper, we study the significance of ecological interactions and separation of birth and death dynamics in stochastic heterogeneous populations via general birth-death processes. Interactions can manifest through the birth dynamics,…
We try to find conditions, the fulfillment of which allows a universe born in a metastable false vacuum state to survive and not to collapse. The conditions found are in the form of inequalities linking the depending on time $t$…
Nowadays, there is evidence that several factors may increase the risk, for an infant, to require stabilisation or resuscitation manoeuvres at birth. However, this risk factors are not completely known, and a universally applicable model…
Much of the research on the behavior of the SIS model on networks has concerned the infinite size limit; in particular the phase transition between a state where outbreaks can reach a finite fraction of the population, and a state where…
We consider a class of birth-and-death processes describing a population made of $d$ sub-populations of different types which interact with one another. The state space is $\mathbb{Z}_+^d$ (unbounded). We assume that the population goes…
Pregnancy loss is recognized as an important competing event in studies of prenatal medication use. However, a healthy live birth also precludes subsequent adverse pregnancy outcomes, yet these events are often censored. Using Monte Carlo…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
We study the positive recurrence of multi-dimensional birth-and-death processes describing the evolution of a large class of stochastic systems, a typical example being the randomly varying number of flow-level transfers in a…
This paper analyzes the dynamics of a level-dependent quasi-birth-death process ${\cal X}=\{(I(t),J(t)): t\geq 0\}$, i.e., a bi-variate Markov chain defined on the countable state space $\cup_{i=0}^{\infty} l(i)$ with $l(i)=\{(i,j) :…
Suppose you are told that taking a statin will reduce your risk of a heart attack or stroke by 3% in the next ten years, or that women have better emotional intelligence than men. You may wonder how accurate the 3% is, or how confident we…
Adverse conditions in early life can have consequential impacts on individuals' health in older age. In one of the first papers on this topic, Barker and Osmond 1986 show a strong positive relationship between infant mortality rates in the…