Related papers: Quantifying Health Shocks Over the Life Cycle

Spreading processes are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems. They can be studied via a plethora of models, depending on the specific details of the phenomena under study. Disease contagion and rumor spreading are among the most…

The risk of dying increases exponentially with age, in humans as well as in many other species. This increase is often attributed to the "accumulation of damage" known to occur in many biological structures and systems. The aim of this…

Consider a system evolving according to an absorbing discrete-time Markov chain with known transition matrix. The state of the system is observed at two points in time, separated by an unknown number of generations. We are interested in…

We model the effects of disease and other exogenous damage during human aging. Even when the exogenous damage is repaired at the end of acute disease, propagated secondary damage remains. We consider both short-term mortality effects due to…

Many researchers have investigated first hitting times as models for survival data. First hitting times arise naturally in many types of stochastic processes, ranging from Wiener processes to Markov chains. In a survival context, the state…

It is well known that the distributions of hitting times in Markov chains are quite irregular, unless the limit as time tends to infinity is considered. We show that nevertheless for a typical finite irreducible Markov chain and for…

The weighted and directed network of countries based on the number of overseas banks is analyzed in terms of its fragility to the banking crisis of one country. We use two different models to describe transmission of shocks, one local and…

Age of Information is a new metric used in real-time status update tracking applications. It measures at the destination the time elapsed since the generation of the last received packet. In this paper, we consider the co-existence of…

The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their…

We examine what happens in a population when it experiences an abrupt change in surrounding conditions. Several cases of such "abrupt transitions" for both physical and living social systems are analyzed from which it can be seen that all…

We study the problem of comparing ageing patterns of the lifetime of k-out-of-n systems. Mathematically, this reduces to being able to decide about a stochastic ordering relationship between different order statistics. We discuss such…

As cancer patient survival improves, late effects from treatment are becoming the next clinical challenge. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, for example, potentially increase the risk of both morbidity and mortality from second malignancies…

This paper examines the long-term gender-specific impacts of parental health shocks on adult children's employment in China. We build up an inter-temporal cooperative framework to analyze household work decisions in response to parental…

A number of biological systems can be modeled by Markov chains. Recently, there has been an increasing concern about when biological systems modeled by Markov chains will perform a dynamic phenomenon called overshoot. In this article, we…

The ordinary contact process is used to model the spread of a disease in a population. In this model, each infected individual waits an exponentially distributed time with parameter 1 before becoming healthy. In this paper, we introduce and…

This paper aims to derive a quantitative model to evaluate the impact of information flow on the effectiveness of disaster response. At the core of the model is a specialized absorbing Markov chain that models the process of delivering…

Multimorbidity, the co-occurrence of two or more chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity or cardiovascular diseases in one patient, is a frequent phenomenon. To make care more efficient, it is of relevance to understand how different…

We discuss various models for epidemics on networks that rely on Markov chains. Random walks on graphs are often used to predict epidemic spread and to investigate possible control actions to mitigate them. In this study, we demonstrate…

We study the impact of teenage sports participation on early-adulthood health using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. We focus on two primary outcomes measured at ages 23--28 -- self-rated health and total…

Human longevity leaders with remarkably long lifespan play a crucial role in the advancement of longevity research. In this paper, we propose a stochastic model to describe the evolution of the age of the oldest person in the world by a…