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On estimation of the variances for critical branching processes with immigration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Chunhua Ma*
Affiliation:
Nankai University
Longmin Wang*
Affiliation:
Nankai University
*
Postal address: School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, P. R. China.
Postal address: School of Mathematical Sciences and LPMC, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, P. R. China.
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Abstract

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The conditional least-squares estimators of the variances are studied for a critical branching process with immigration that allows the offspring distributions to have infinite fourth moments. We derive different forms of limiting distributions for these estimators when the offspring distributions have regularly varying tails with index α. In particular, in the case in which 2 < α < 8/3, the normalizing factor of the estimator for the offspring variance is smaller than √n, which is different from that of Winnicki (1991).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2010 

Footnotes

Supported by the NSFC (grant numbeers 10871103 and 10971106)

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