Phenomenology of stochastic exponential growth

Brownian motion is a Gaussian process described by the central limit theorem. However, exponential decays of the positional probability density function $P(X,t)$ of packets of spreading random walkers, were observed in numerous situations that include glasses, live cells and bacteria suspensions. We show that such exponential behavior is generally valid in a large class of problems of transport in random media. By extending the Large Deviations approach for a continuous time ...

Random multiplicative processes $w_t =\lambda_1 \lambda_2 ... \lambda_t$ (with < \lambda_j > 0 ) lead, in the presence of a boundary constraint, to a distribution $P(w_t)$ in the form of a power law $w_t^{-(1+\mu)}$. We provide a simple and physically intuitive derivation of this result based on a random walk analogy and show the following: 1) the result applies to the asymptotic ($t \to \infty$) distribution of $w_t$ and should be distinguished from the central limit theorem...

In the present paper we provide the closed form of the path-like solutions for the logistic and $\theta$-logistic stochastic differential equations, along with the exact expressions of both their probability density functions and their moments. We simulate in addition a few typical sample trajectories, and we provide a few examples of numerical computation of the said closed formulas at different noise intensities: this shows in particular that an increasing randomness - whil...

We study the dynamics of a system composed of interacting units each with a complex internal structure comprising many subunits. We consider the case in which each subunit grows in a multiplicative manner. We propose a model for such systems in which the interaction among the units is treated in a mean field approximation and the interaction among subunits is nonlinear. To test the model, we identify a large data base spanning 20 years, and find that the model correctly predi...

Cell growth in size is a complex process coordinated by intrinsic and environmental signals. In a recent work [Tzur et al., Science, 2009, 325:167-171], size distributions in an exponentially growing population of mammalian cells were used to infer the growth rate in size. The results suggest that cell growth is neither linear nor exponential, but subject to size-dependent regulation. To explain their data, we build a model in which the cell growth rate is controlled by the r...

This paper studies theory and inference related to a class of time series models that incorporates nonlinear dynamics. It is assumed that the observations follow a one-parameter exponential family of distributions given an accompanying process that evolves as a function of lagged observations. We employ an iterated random function approach and a special coupling technique to show that, under suitable conditions on the parameter space, the conditional mean process is a geometr...

Recent researches on complex systems highlighted the so-called super-linear growth phenomenon. As the system size $P$ measured as population in cities or active users in online communities increases, the total activities $X$ measured as GDP or number of new patents, crimes in cities generated by these people also increases but in a faster rate. This accelerating growth phenomenon can be well described by a super-linear power law $X \propto P^{\gamma}$($\gamma>1$). However, th...

Deterministically growing (wild-type) populations which seed stochastically developing mutant clones have found an expanding number of applications from microbial populations to cancer. The special case of exponential wild-type population growth, usually termed the Luria-Delbr\"uck or Lea-Coulson model, is often assumed but seldom realistic. In this article we generalise this model to different types of wild-type population growth, with mutants evolving as a birth-death branc...

The advent of new experimental genomic technologies and the massive increase of DNA sequence information is helping researchers better understand how our genes work. Recently, experiments on mRNA abundance (gene expression) have revealed that gene expression shows a stationary organization described by a power-law distribution (scale-free organization) (i.e., gene expression $k$ decays as $k^{-\gamma}$), which is highly conserved in all the major five kingdoms of life, from B...

Proliferating cell populations at steady state growth often exhibit broad protein distributions with exponential tails. The sources of this variation and its universality are of much theoretical interest. Here we address the problem by asymptotic analysis of the Population Balance Equation. We show that the steady state distribution tail is determined by a combination of protein production and cell division and is insensitive to other model details. Under general conditions t...