A Computational Comparison of Alternatives to Including Uncertainty in Structured Population

Two conceptually different approaches to incorporate growth uncertainty into sizestructured population models have recently been investigated. One entails imposing a probabilistic structure on all the possible growth rates across the entire population, which results in a growth rate distribution model. The other involves formulating growth as a Markov stochastic diffusion process, which leads to a Fokker-Planck model. Numerical computations verify that a Fokker-Planck model and a growth rate distribution model can, with properly chosen parameters, yield quite similar time dependent population densities. The relationship between the two models is based on the theoretical analysis in [7].