This book introduces biological examples of Branching Processes from molecular and cellular biology as well as from the fields of human evolution and medicine and discusses them in the context of the relevant mathematics. It provides a useful introduction to how the modeling can be done and for what types of problems branching processes can be used.

This book covers the mathematical idea of branching processes, and tailors it for a biological audience.

One of the charms of mathematics is the contrast between its generality and its applicability to concrete, even everyday, problems. Branching processes are typical in this. Their niche of mathematics is the abstract pattern of reproduction, sets of individuals changing size and composition through their members reproducing; in other words, what Plato might have called the pure idea behind demography, population biology, cell kinetics, molecular replication, or nuclear ?ssion, had he known these scienti?c ?elds. Even in the performance of algorithms for sorting and classi?cation there is an inkling of the same pattern. In special cases, general properties of the abstract ideal then interact with the physical or biological or whatever properties at hand. But the population, or bran- ing, pattern is strong; it tends to dominate, and here lies the reason for the extreme usefulness of branching processes in diverse applications. Branching is a clean and beautiful mathematical pattern, with an intellectually challenging intrinsic structure, and it pervades the phenomena it underlies.

This volume gathers papers originally presented at the 3rd Workshop on Branching Processes and their Applications (WBPA15), which was held from 7 to 10 April 2015 in Badajoz, Spain (http://branching.unex.es/wbpa15/index.htm). The papers address a broad range of theoretical and practical aspects of branching process theory. Further, they amply demonstrate that the theoretical research in this area remains vital and topical, as well as the relevance of branching concepts in the development of theoretical approaches to solving new problems in applied fields such as Epidemiology, Biology, Genetics, and, of course, Population Dynamics. The topics covered can broadly be classified into the following areas: 1. Coalescent Branching Processes 2. Branching Random Walks 3. Population Growth Models in Varying and Random Environments 4. Size/Density/Resource-Dependent Branching Models 5. Age-Dependent Branching Models 6. Special Branching Models 7. Applications in Epidemiology 8. Applications in Biology and Genetics Offering a valuable reference guide to contemporary branching process theory, the book also explores many open problems, paving the way for future research.

The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive discussion of the available results for discrete time branching processes with random control functions. The independence of individuals’ reproduction is a fundamental assumption in the classical branching processes. Alternatively, the controlled branching processes (CBPs) allow the number of reproductive individuals in one generation to decrease or increase depending on the size of the previous generation. Generating a wide range of behaviors, the CBPs have been successfully used as modeling tools in diverse areas of applications.

Branching processes are stochastic processes which represent the reproduction of particles, such as individuals within a population, and thereby model demographic stochasticity. In branching processes in random environment (BPREs), additional environmental stochasticity is incorporated, meaning that the conditions of reproduction may vary in a random fashion from one generation to the next. This book offers an introduction to the basics of BPREs and then presents the cases of critical and subcritical processes in detail, the latter dividing into weakly, intermediate, and strongly subcritical regimes.

An Introduction to Stochastic Processes with Applications to Biology, Second Edition presents the basic theory of stochastic processes necessary in understanding and applying stochastic methods to biological problems in areas such as population growth and extinction, drug kinetics, two-species competition and predation, the spread of epidemics, and

This sequel to volume 19 of Handbook on Statistics on Stochastic Processes: Modelling and Simulation is concerned mainly with the theme of reviewing and, in some cases, unifying with new ideas the different lines of research and developments in stochastic processes of applied flavour. This volume consists of 23 chapters addressing various topics in stochastic processes. These include, among others, those on manufacturing systems, random graphs, reliability, epidemic modelling, self-similar processes, empirical processes, time series models, extreme value therapy, applications of Markov chains, modelling with Monte Carlo techniques, and stochastic processes in subjects such as engineering, telecommunications, biology, astronomy and chemistry. particular with modelling, simulation techniques and numerical methods concerned with stochastic processes. The scope of the project involving this volume as well as volume 19 is already clarified in the preface of volume 19. The present volume completes the aim of the project and should serve as an aid to students, teachers, researchers and practitioners interested in applied stochastic processes.