Abstract
We read that in a certain country the birth rate per thousand population is 34. What does that mean? It does not mean that for every randomly chosen group of 1,000 persons there will be exactly 34 births per year; instead, there is an average of 34 births per thousand persons per year. For any particular group the actual number of births fluctuates about 34 (the birth rate is a conditional probability). It is implied that the birth “process” remains rather steady over time, a property that we call stationarity. Birth and death processes, nuclear reactions, wind velocities, Brownian motion, random walks, and shot noise in tubes are just a few of the processes that vary with time and that we describe in this chapter.
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References
Stochastic processes is not an elementary subject, and I do not know of any easy book. For a first reading I would use Bailey, N. T. 1964.The Elements of Stochastic Processes. New York: Wiley and Sons, or
Parzen E. 1962. Stochastic Processes. San Francisco: Holden-Day.
The classic in this field is Karlin, S., and Taylor, H. M. 1968. A First Course in Stochastic Processes. New York: Academic Press
For an easier book on Markov chains, I recommend Kemeny, J. G., and Snell, J. L. 1960.Finite Markov Chains. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.
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© 1986 Chapman and Hall
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Tietjen, G.L. (1986). Stochastic Processes. In: A Topical Dictionary of Statistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1967-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1967-2_9
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