TY - JOUR
T1 - Phenomenology of stochastic exponential growth
AU - Pirjol, Dan
AU - Jafarpour, Farshid
AU - Iyer-Biswas, Srividya
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 American Physical Society.
PY - 2017/6/9
Y1 - 2017/6/9
N2 - Stochastic exponential growth is observed in a variety of contexts, including molecular autocatalysis, nuclear fission, population growth, inflation of the universe, viral social media posts, and financial markets. Yet literature on modeling the phenomenology of these stochastic dynamics has predominantly focused on one model, geometric Brownian motion (GBM), which can be described as the solution of a Langevin equation with linear drift and linear multiplicative noise. Using recent experimental results on stochastic exponential growth of individual bacterial cell sizes, we motivate the need for a more general class of phenomenological models of stochastic exponential growth, which are consistent with the observation that the mean-rescaled distributions are approximately stationary at long times. We show that this behavior is not consistent with GBM, instead it is consistent with power-law multiplicative noise with positive fractional powers. Therefore, we consider this general class of phenomenological models for stochastic exponential growth, provide analytical solutions, and identify the important dimensionless combination of model parameters, which determines the shape of the mean-rescaled distribution. We also provide a prescription for robustly inferring model parameters from experimentally observed stochastic growth trajectories.
AB - Stochastic exponential growth is observed in a variety of contexts, including molecular autocatalysis, nuclear fission, population growth, inflation of the universe, viral social media posts, and financial markets. Yet literature on modeling the phenomenology of these stochastic dynamics has predominantly focused on one model, geometric Brownian motion (GBM), which can be described as the solution of a Langevin equation with linear drift and linear multiplicative noise. Using recent experimental results on stochastic exponential growth of individual bacterial cell sizes, we motivate the need for a more general class of phenomenological models of stochastic exponential growth, which are consistent with the observation that the mean-rescaled distributions are approximately stationary at long times. We show that this behavior is not consistent with GBM, instead it is consistent with power-law multiplicative noise with positive fractional powers. Therefore, we consider this general class of phenomenological models for stochastic exponential growth, provide analytical solutions, and identify the important dimensionless combination of model parameters, which determines the shape of the mean-rescaled distribution. We also provide a prescription for robustly inferring model parameters from experimentally observed stochastic growth trajectories.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062406
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062406
M3 - Article
C2 - 28709229
AN - SCOPUS:85020749902
SN - 2470-0045
VL - 95
JO - Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
JF - Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics
IS - 6
M1 - 062406
ER -