Asymptotic growth of a class of size-and-age-dependent birth processes

Abstract

A class of binary fission stochastic population models is described, in which the fission probabilities may depend on the age of an individual and the total population size. Age-dependent binary branching processes with Erlangian lifelength distributions are a special case. An asymptotic expression for the growth of the population size is developed, which generalizes known theorems about the asymptotic exponential growth of a branching process.