Article ID: | iaor20051512 |
Country: | Australia |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 13 |
End Page Number: | 21 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2004 |
Journal: | Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics |
Authors: | Gani J. |
This paper revisits a simple birth–death model which arises in slightly different forms in four distinct stochastic problems. These are the barbershop queue, coupon collecting, vocabulary usage and geological dating. Discrete and continuous time Markov chains are used to characterize these problems. Somewhat different questions are posed for each particular case, and practical results are derived for each process. The paper concludes with some comments on the versatility of this applied probability model.