Title: Branching processes in epidemiology
Abstract: I will give a brief intro to the probability generating functions
and use the PGFs to study the Galton-Watson branching process. Specifically,
I will explicitly calculate the mean and the variance of the G-W BP in time as
well as the probability of ultimate extinction of the process. Then I will discuss
two applications of BPs to estimating the probability of the epidemic outbreak
within the SIR and SEIR modeling frameworks.