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Existence and non-existence of consistent estimators in supercritical controlled branching processes

Published: April 4, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2504.03389v2

By: Peter Braunsteins, Sophie Hautphenne, James Kerlidis

Potential Business Impact:

Figures out how populations grow and change.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a supercritical controlled branching process consistently from a single observed trajectory of population size counts. Our goal is to establish which parameters can and cannot be consistently estimated. When a parameter can be consistently estimated, we derive an explicit expression for the estimator. We address these questions in three scenarios: when the distribution of the control function distribution is known, when it is unknown, and when progenitor numbers are observed alongside population size counts. Our results offer a theoretical justification for the common practice in population ecology of estimating demographic and environmental stochasticity using separate observation schemes.

Country of Origin
🇦🇺 Australia

Page Count
39 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Probability