A test of homogeneity for age-dependent branching processes with immigration

Abstract

We propose a novel procedure to test whether the immigration process of a discretely observed age-dependent branching process with immigration is time-homogeneous. The construction of the test is motivated by the behavior of the coefficient of variation of the population size. When immigration is time-homogeneous, we find that this coefficient converges to a constant, whereas when immigration is time-inhomogeneous it is time-dependent, at least transiently. Thus, we test the assumption that the immigration process is time-homogeneous by verifying that the sample coefficient of variation does not vary significantly over time. The test is simple to run and does not require specification or fitting any branching process to the data. Its implementation is identical whether the process is sub-, super-, or critical. Simulations and an application to real data on the progression of leukemia are presented to illustrate the approach.