Reducible branching processes: theory and applications
Peter Olofsson
Department of Statistics, Rice University, Houston, USA
Abstract
Assuming a multi-type branching process to be irreducible leads to
the well known characteristics of exponential growth and stable type
composition. When the irreducibility assumption is relaxed, the
process can exhibit quite a different behavior. We survey some of the
theory for reducible branching processes and investigate some
applications where such processes naturally arise.