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A note on quasi-stationary distributions of birth–death processes and the SIS logistic epidemic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Damian Clancy*
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Philip K. Pollett*
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
*
Postal address: Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZL, UK. Email address: d.clancy@liv.ac.uk
∗∗Postal address: Department of Mathematics, University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia

Abstract

For Markov processes on the positive integers with the origin as an absorbing state, Ferrari, Kesten, Martínez and Picco studied the existence of quasi-stationary and limiting conditional distributions by characterizing quasi-stationary distributions as fixed points of a transformation Φ on the space of probability distributions on {1, 2, …}. In the case of a birth–death process, the components of Φ(ν) can be written down explicitly for any given distribution ν. Using this explicit representation, we will show that Φ preserves likelihood ratio ordering between distributions. A conjecture of Kryscio and Lefèvre concerning the quasi-stationary distribution of the SIS logistic epidemic follows as a corollary.

Type
Short Communications
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2003 

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