3: Stochastic Population Growth
Our derivation of the Malthusian growth model implicitly assumed a large population size. Smaller populations exhibit stochastic effects and these can considerably complicate the modeling. Since in general, modeling stochastic processes in biology is an important yet difficult topic, we will spend some time here analyzing the simplest model of births in finite populations.
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- 3.3: Simulation of Population Growth
- As we have seen, stochastic modeling is significantly more complicated than deterministic modeling. As the modeling becomes more sophisticated, a numerical simulation becomes necessary. Here, for illustration, we show how to simulate individual realizations of population growth.